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It’s hard to know, at first, what problem the Brava smart oven is supposed to solve. Its value proposition—to use the Silicon Valley parlance—is a bit diluted. Is it supposed to heat up more quickly than your current oven? Is it designed to distribute heat in an innovative way? Is it supposed to be more energy efficient? Is it compatible with an app—and does that make it better? Will it be smarter than your current oven?
The short answer, according to the entrepreneurs at Brava, is all of the above. You will want to spend $995 on Brava’s Wi-Fi-connected countertop oven, the pitch goes, because it will make your insanely busy life better.
While Brava is launching with a piece of hardware, the company is selling more than just an oven.
The long answer is more complex than that. Brava may indeed be a beautifully made oven packed with time-saving tech. But it’s not just the oven you’ll pay for; you’ll need some accessories to get the most out of it. And, as part of Brava’s launch this fall, the company plans to offer a food delivery service that drops ready-to-cook items onto your doorstep. Sure, you can buy your own groceries and make stuff with the Brava, but the company will try to convince you its produce options are superior. So while Brava is launching with a piece of hardware, the company is selling more than just an oven.
The company’s business models mirrors that of other startups offering hardware with a service attached. Most famously, Peloton sells pricey exercise equipment—$2,000 for its stationary bike, $4,000 for its new treadmill—that you use while livestreaming workout classes through its $39-a-month subscription service.
Brava is, in a bizarre way, the Peloton of ovens.
That makes a lot of sense when you consider that Brava CEO John Pleasants is the brother-in-law of John Foley, the CEO of Peloton, which has taken the fitness world by storm. Pleasants joined Brava as CEO in August 2016, having previously worked as an executive at Disney and Samsung. But the idea for Brava started percolating back in 2013, during the holidays.
As Pleasants and chief technology officer Thomas Cheng tell it, their co-founder Dan Yue was enjoying a holiday meal with his family when he noticed that his mother, who was prepping the food, wasn’t really an active participant in the dinner. She was too stressed out to talk, running back and forth between the kitchen and dining room. “What if the oven knew what was inside of it, and knew when to start and stop? That was the very basic thought. What if she could have more time at the dining room table?” Pleasants said. (Yue wasn’t there the day I visited Brava’s office, so I didn’t hear this story from him firsthand.)
Two years later, in 2015, Yue and Cheng connected and decided to make something together. They had actually gone to high school together in Palo Alto in the late 1990s, so it was a reunion of sorts. By June of that year, they had come up with the first Brava oven prototype, made from the parts of off-the-shelf countertop ovens. The following year was when Pleasants joined as CEO.
The team ended up making 15 prototypes in Cheng’s garage, some of which are now on display in Brava’s Redwood City offices. These include small countertop ovens, large countertop ovens, units with only one heating element, some with three heating elements, a copper-coated prototype, an oven with a removable magnetic knob, and another oven with a slot for a smartphone on top, which is where a display would eventually be built in.
“We wanted to make sure we could do a 12-inch pizza and a 6-pound chicken,” Pleasants said. “Those were the two thresholds we felt were really important. After we figured out the sizing, we got fancy.”
Three years and $25 million in venture-capital funding later, Brava is finally launching its debut product. Its run up to launch wasn’t completely stealthy; funding rounds were made public, and thanks to a trademark filing, some details about the oven had had leaked in advance. A report last year from The Spoon noted that the upcoming smart oven would have “a number of interesting features.”
A Brava oven weighs 34 pounds. Inside the anodized aluminum case is a stainless steel interior cooking chamber. It’s 11.3 inches tall, 14.1 inches wide and 16.7 inches deep, which means it’s large enough that you should measure your countertop space before you buy one. Its top is covered in a food-safe, high temperature silicone, with a thick glass strip at the edge. It has a single physical button for starting and stopping the cooking process, and a 5-inch, multi-touch LCD display.
That display is where you’ll swipe and tap and essentially tell the Brava what you’re cooking, so it can do all the cognitive work for you beyond that. You can also send recipes from the Brava mobile app directly to the oven over Wi-Fi.
The oven’s heating elements include six, 270-millimeter bulbs. They resemble incandescent bulbs or tungsten halogen lamps, but they have been tweaked for culinary use. Brava likes to say the bulbs can ramp up to full power in under a second. That’s one of the things that’s supposed to make a Brava oven different—how quickly it heats up. But the more interesting part is how the heat is controlled, a technology that Brava has labeled “Pure Light.” There are three zones inside the oven, and they can each be heated independently of one another. The heat of these zones can be dialed up or down depending on what you’re cooking.
It’s basically cooking by numbers. Let’s say you’re making a protein, a starch, and a vegetable. You’re supposed to tell the Brava oven what you’re about to cook, and it would then assign a number to each of your ingredients. Each number corresponds to one of the labeled sections on the custom-made trays Brava sells. Place your ingredients in the designated sections of your tray, shove a Swiss-made temperature sensor in the protein, slide the tray in the oven, and each portion of the meal will cook at the appropriate temperature for the appropriate amount of time. The company tells me the oven is capable enough to sear meats.
Cheng, the CTO, says the oven’s lamps aren’t the magical part of this equation. It’s the whole package: the control system, the software, the sensors. “I wouldn’t call this a revolution, but more of an extreme evolution of sorts,” he says. “One, it’s just far more powerful, and two, it’s far more precise in controlling the elements.”
The Brava oven also has a 5-megapixel, fisheye camera inside of it, which is less about allowing mere mortals to watch their food cook and more about training Brava’s machine-learning engine. The camera itself doesn’t even recognize the food item you’ve put inside the oven. Instead, it’s designed to capture the surface texture of the food, the company says, and it’s using that gathered information to gauge how well something is cooked. Once it sees dinner’s done, the oven shuts itself off.
The demo I saw involved using Brava’s AI to make toast. To develop the machine-intelligence component, Brava’s software engineers loaded up gobs of food photos; in this case, pictures of toasted bread. Then, Brava’s staff of seven chefs looked at those toast pics—uncooked bread, cooked toast, burned toast—and helped put together a kind of matrix for what an ideal piece of toast looks like. This database, which now contains thousands of food items, lives in the cloud, but Brava has condensed it down to a model that lives on the oven.
During the demo, I watched through the Brava camera as a slice of bread went from white and doughy to a crisp, medium brown; while a laptop sitting on top of the oven (just for the purposes of the demo) showed the computational process behind it.
Those same chefs are a critical part of Brava’s other big sell: its food delivery service. It’s an a la carte food service, not a subscription business, and all of the foods are sourced by Travis Rea, Brava’s head chef. The beef is from Double R Ranch, the salmon is Ora King salmon, and the veggies are organic. One of the eggs suppliers is Good Eggs. Los Angeles-based Chef’d is assembling and fulfilling the food orders.
Of course, you can buy your own food and cook it in the Brava oven. But Brava says your experience will be optimized if you buy direct. The cuts of meat will be just the right thickness, Brava’s recipes are designed around these ingredients, and so on. Pleasants emphasized that he believes Brava isn’t just about the hardware; it’s about the relationships you’ll have with chefs, with other people in the community sharing recipes. Like Peloton.
This kind of magical cooking doesn’t come cheap. $995 gets you the oven, two oven trays, and sensor, plus a dinner for two that you order through Brava. Spend $1,295, and you get three additional accessories—a chef’s pan, a cast iron grill pan, and an egg tray—as well as a $150 food credit. The meals cost, on average, $13 to $15 per serving. So, dinner for two costs between $26 and $30. Brava says the oven will ship in November.
“There have been a lot of entrepreneurial efforts around making the act of getting food more convenient,” says Aileen Lee, the founder of Cowboy Ventures, which invested in Brava. “But this is about making it easier to cook, and I think people actually like to cook. And an hour to an hour-and-a-half prep for a meal is just not a reality for a lot of people.” Another reason why Lee invested, she tells me, is that what Brava’s doing is technically challenging.
Brava is part of a broader trend around connected kitchen appliances, and specifically, around oven technology, which goes beyond just using an app or shouting “Alexa!” at something. Size-wise, Brava falls into the same category as the June countertop oven, a $1,495 convection oven that uses carbon fiber heating elements that are designed to heat up quickly. The Miele Dialog oven is a full oven, not a countertop oven, that also holds the promise of precisely controlling the cooking process, through electromagnetic waves that are emitted at specific frequencies. It started selling in select countries in Europe last month.
But Brava’s claim that its main product is the “fastest oven in the world” applies only to certain foods. During my visit to Brava, I saw multiple food items being cooked (and even participated in some of the cooking), and times varied. That piece of toast, for example, still took around three and a half minutes to brown properly, so, not very fast. An egg and cheese frittata, cooked in an egg tray, took around six minutes. The founders say that not all foods will cook at supersonic speeds; but since the Brava is taking up significant counter space, they wanted to ensure that it could do some of the basics, like toasting, in case you ditched your toaster.
Even with foods that do cook quickly, that claim is difficult to fact-check. Cheng is candid about the fact that Brava’s marketing copy—”zero to 500 degrees in under a second”—wasn’t something that thrilled him. “I wanted to clarify one thing. What it actually does is it goes from zero to as if you’re at 500 degrees,” he says. “If you try to do that with a completely cold oven, you’d have a safety override, and you’d have to hack something to do this. This is effectively a 500-degree oven.”
And considering that the oven will likely only cook enough food for four people at a time—or two very hungry adults—you’ll have to factor in that you might end up cooking in batches.
On the upside, the total cook time for salmon and asparagus was around 12 minutes that day in Brava’s kitchen, and a filet mignon has a typical cook time of 15 to 18 minutes. Considering how ridiculously long it takes for my own electric oven to heat up, that was a marked improvement. The skin on the salmon was also crispy, which would normally only happen if I had pan-seared it.
You can also set the Brava’s zone temperatures yourself, or, if you’d like, just crank up the oven to a specific temperature and cook something in an un-smart way. I ask Pleasants and Cheng whether a customer needed to have the Brava connected to the internet. Basically, is the kitchen of the future one in which you can’t cook some vegetables without being Wi-Fi-connected?
No, you don’t have to connect it to the internet, Pleasants says. But you’ll want to. “Just like a Tesla, we can update the features and the operating system over time,” he says. “Another thing is the recipes—we give you new ones every week, and you’ll want to be able to see them.”
Earlier, I ask Pleasants about another Silicon Valley hardware startup, one that sold an expensive, internet-connected juice machine that didn’t work out. Did stories like that concern him as he readies to launch a food-related hardware product?
“Every industry sector has its stories like that,” he says. “You have to stand behind the quality of your product and the problem you are solving. I think we’re solving a real problem.”
So who is this tiny Surface Go actually made for? It depends on who you ask at Microsoft, but the short answer seems to be: anybody and everybody.
Urbanowicz, the product marketing manager, says Go is about “reaching more audiences, and embracing the word ‘and’: I can be a mother, and an entrepreneurial badass; I can be a student, and a social justice warrior.” Kyriacou, when describing the Go’s cameras, says to “think about the front line worker in the field—a construction worker, architect, they can capture what they need to or even scan a document.” You can also dock the Go, Kyriacou points out, using the Surface Connect port, which makes it ideal for business travelers. Groene talks about reading, about drawing, about running software applications like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. Almost everyone talks about watching Hulu and Netflix on it.
Panos Panay initially has a philosophical answer to this. It’s his “dream,” he says, to just get Surface products to more people. “I mean, that’s not my ultimate dream. But there are these blurred lines of life and work that are happening, and if you collect all that, Go was an obvious step for us.”
The evening before Panay and I chatted, he went to the Bellevue Square shopping center with his son, and at one point, had to pull out his LTE-equipped Surface Go to address what he said was an urgent work issue. His son asked if it was a new product, and Panay, realizing the blunder of having the thing out in public, tucked the Go in his jacket. To him, that’s the perfect anecdote: The lines between work and family time were blurred, he had to do something quickly, and when he was done, he could make his computer disappear.
Panos Panay, Microsoft’s chief product officer.
Panay’s team also has a lot more insight into how people are using Surface products than it did eight years ago, he says, when Surface was still just a concept being developed in a dark lab. To be sure, Microsoft has been making hardware for decades—keyboards, mice, web cameras, Xbox consoles. But when Microsoft made the decision to start making its own PCs (and ultimately, take more control over how its software ran on laptops), it was a new hardware category for the company. It was a chance to get consumers excited about Microsoft again, not just enterprise customers.
The first few years of Surface were rocky. The first one, known as Surface RT, seems to be something that Microsoft executives would rather forget about; I don’t see it anywhere in the product lineups that Microsoft’s PR team has laid out ahead of my visit. Its 2012 launch coincided with the rollout of Windows 8, which had an entirely new UI from the previous version of Windows. It ran on a 32-bit ARM architecture, which meant it ran a version of the operating system called Windows RT. Depending on who you ask, the Surface RT was either a terrible idea or ahead of its time. (Panay says it was visionary.) Microsoft ending up taking a massive write-down on it the following year.
Since then, Microsoft has rolled out a series of Surface products that, due to the company’s design ethos, a newer operating system, and plain old Moore’s Law, have only gotten better. In 2013 it introduced the Surface Pro line, which are still detachables, but are built to perform like a premium laptop and can cost anywhere from $799 to $2,600. There’s the Surface Book line; the Surface Book 2 starts at $1,199 and clocks in around 3.5 pounds, making it a serious commitment of a laptop. The Surface Studio is a gorgeous, $2,999, all-in-one desktop PC, aimed at creative types. The Surface Laptop is Microsoft’s answer to Apple’s MacBook Air. It starts at $799, and got largely positive reviews when it launched last year.
Even still, Microsoft’s Surface line has struggled to make a significant dent in the market for personal computing. HP and Lenovo dominate the broader PC market, while Apple leads in the tablet category (including both detachables and slate tablets).“From a shipment perspective, the entire Surface portfolio has been fairly soft,” says Linn Huang, an IDC research director who tracks devices and displays. “It was growing tremendously, and then the iPad Pro launched and Surface shipments have either been negative, year-over-year, for the past several quarters, or flat.”
Microsoft has new competition to worry about, too: Google’s inexpensive Chromebooks, which in a short amount of time have taken over a large share of the education market.
“Do I think about Chromebooks? Absolutely,” Panay says, when I ask him about them. “Do I think about iPads? Absolutely. I use multiple devices. It’s exhausting. But this product is meant to bring you a full app suite.” Panay is highlighting one of the drawbacks of lightweight Chromebooks: Their lack of local storage. Meanwhile, he says, Surfaces are designed to let people be productive both locally on the device, and in the cloud when they need to work in the cloud.
And, while Panay says he’s keeping an eye on Chromebooks, he insists that Microsoft didn’t build Go to compete with Chromebooks. That said, Surface Go will have a school-specific software option: IT administrators for schools can choose whether they want a batch of Go’s imaged with Windows 10 Pro Education, or Windows 10 S mode-enabled.
Panay wouldn’t comment on Microsoft’s plans for the future beyond Surface Go, although there have long been rumors of a possible Microsoft handheld device, codenamed Andromeda. If the Surface Go is something of a return to a smaller, 10-inch detachable, then a pocketable device that folds in half, one that could potentially run on an ARM processor, would be something of a return to mobile for Microsoft. Qualcomm has also been making mobile chips that are designed to compete directly with Intel’s Core processors for PCs.
For now, though, Panay is throwing all his chips behind the Surface Go, and making a big bet that this little device is the one that will make the masses fall in love with Surface. He tends to chalk up past Surface products, even the ones that didn’t do well, as simply before their time. Now, with the Go, he says, “it’s time.”
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The ultradurable, resin-fiber-reinforced sailcloth exterior of Truce’s bag is made from sails that once powered racing yachts. Add a seam-sealed liner fashioned out of leftover fabric from dry suits—like a wet suit for diving, but you don’t get wet—and you have a waterproof shell that can shed even the hardest rain. Compression straps help stabilize the load, and a moisture-wicking lumbar pad helps keep your back dry during steamy hikes to remote waterfalls.
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This article appears in the July issue. Subscribe now.
Has Netflix’s sizeable investment in original science-fiction movies been a bust? By one popular metric, Rotten Tomatoes, the answer would seem to be: Categorically. Since 2017’s Okja, a feisty ecological fairy tale by Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho, Netflix has put out seven back-to-back stinkers, their average “freshness” score rounding up to 30 percent. You can practically smell the putrefaction.
Well, perhaps that’s harsh. Only one of the seven can be called unwatchable: Duncan Jones’ Mute, an overlong and sexually confused nightclub noir that trips over itself to imagine a neon-colored vision of future Berlin peopled by the likes of a mustachioed Paul Rudd. This is terribly sad, considering the director’s first two films, Moon and Source Code, were the exact opposite—careful, contained stories that played out in modest settings. A man alone on a ship. Strangers talking on a train. Nothing flashy, but minor masterpieces nonetheless, infinitely more enjoyable than Mute, not to mention Jones’ other recent catastrophe, Warcraft.
In fact, the best sci-fi movies of the past few years share this early-Jones quality of smallness. We’re witnessing, it seems, the localization of the genre, if not its full-on domestication. Consider: Arrival takes place in a field; Annihilation, a swamp; Ex Machina, quite literally a house. The first two follow women negotiating motherhood and an affair, respectively; the latter centers on what is essentially a perverted stay-at-home dad. Starships will always jump to light speed and boldly go, but the franchising of outer space by the Marvels and the Disneys has pushed our more inventive creators inward. They think less about far-out expanses and more in terms of interiors, enclosures, zones, family units.
So, it turns out, does Netflix. That’s what’s doubly (or septuply) unfortunate about this unhappy heptalogy of feature-length flops. With the exception of Mute, these films get the idea. Diligently, they’re tightening their focus, relocating sci-fi to terras more cognita—Anon and The Titan star fathers in confined industrial spaces; What Happened to Monday features seven identical sisters trapped indoors—in order to find in these intimate environs new conflict and meaning. The impulse is as noble as the execution is dreadful. And the best-worst example might be the most recent addition to the list, last month’s Tau.
Much like Ex Machina, Tau is set in a house, the definitional domicile. Tau is, in a sense, the house itself, the artificial intelligence (voiced, the credits insist, by Gary Oldman) that runs it. Our protagonist, a petty thief named Julia (Maika Monroe), knows nothing of Tau when she wakes up in one of its cells, mouth covered and hands tied. In short order, a man whose face is conveniently obscured by shafts of evil light puts an implant in the back of her head.
Once first-time director Federico D’Alessandro—he’s a Marvel vet in animatics—sees fit to unshadow our villain, the reveal provides minimal shock: It’s Ed Skrein (the original Daario Naharis in Game of Thrones) playing a wunderkind inventor named Alex with a sadistic habit of keeping people locked up in his basement so he can convert the electrical signals in their brains into algorithms that will make some future version of Tau even more HAL-like. He keeps an issue of WIRED magazine with a smarmy photo of himself on the cover hanging from a wall. That last detail, at least, feels perfectly plausible.
Julia spends nearly the whole movie under Tau’s watchful, pulsing triangular eye. Where Tau can’t go, its squad of nano-drones or its killing-machine enforcer, Aries, can. Escape is therefore unlikely; safer simply to explore the habitat. Not since Ridley Scott’s labyrinths has a setting been so comprehensively mapped: main room, kitchen, living room, library, bathroom, hallways, back rooms, staircase, bedroom. Most surfaces are covered in “smart paint” that lets you open doors or summon Tau. Alex is an absent father. He forces Tau to perform tests on Julia, showing up mainly to issue threats and eat gelatinous squares of future food moodily.
Applaud the concept. In the modern era, the home is very much the locus of lived science fiction, our most private space made uncanny, unheimlich, by the invasion of technologies with names like Alexa and Nest. Correctly, sci-fi creators perceive this fear and wish to explore and exploit it. If Tau had even a byte of *Ex Machina’*s intelligence, that movie’s examination of power and control, it would’ve been a worthy effort.
But what’s it saying? Julia, a nothing character, ends up teaching Tau, a generic AI, about history and the outside world, while an empty villain punishes both. The only shading is the uncomfortable lighting, which switches between harsh reds and blues and yellows to broadcast Tone and Mood. Even the 1999 Disney Channel Original Movie Smart House brought value to the proposition. There, the central AI has to work through notions of protection versus imprisonment, a real dilemma for any higher-functioning robot. Here, the AI wants to learn more about cavemen.
In the modern era, the home is very much the locus of lived science fiction, our most private space made uncanny by the invasion of technologies with names like Alexa and Nest. Correctly, creators perceive this fear and wish to explore and exploit it.
Not every piece of sci-fi must have a deep point, of course. The most watchable of Netflix’s Unmagnificent Seven is probably The Cloverfield Paradox, in which an international crew of astronauts must find a way to restore energy to Earth. Then something happens and they pop into a parallel reality. Classically space age-y though it seems, Cloverfield Paradox too is domestic sci-fi. The film only leaves the confines of the spacecraft (a floating house) to cut to Earth, where the husband of the one of the astronauts thinks about his wife and family. They lost their kids in an accident, but in the other dimension, the kids are still alive. It’s fun stuff, and the cast is outstanding. To name a few: Gugu Mbatha-Raw, David Oyelowo, Chris O’Dowd, Ziyi Zhang, and Elizabeth Debicki, who makes the greatest entrance of the year, screaming as she bloodily materializes in the walls of the ship.
Dumb ending, though—but then they needed to position Paradox within the Cloverfield paracosm. The other six Netflix originals can’t make that excuse, and to a one their codas implode. Nonsensical twists, bad speeches, and so, so much death, multiple bodies in every movie, the pile-up somehow both tedious and gratuitous. (Noomi Rapace is offed not just in What Happened to Monday—several times—but also in Bright, the Will Smith buddy-cop fantasy that’s not as joyless as it looks, but certainly as stupid.) That’s Netflix’s other major failing here: the infusion of horror. Unless very subtly applied, horror tropes are too obvious in domestic sci-fi, where we’re already plenty scared, claustrophobic, and alert.
Very early in Tau, both of Julia’s prison mates are murdered by a killer robot. Picture pleading eyes and hear limbs being torn asunder. What we’re left with is just Julia, a random, boring, unsympathetic woman with a thing stuck in her head. There’s really only one explanation, one final defense of this ridiculous exercise in filmmaking. Think about it carefully. That thing in her head, the implant, is measuring Julia’s brainwaves, decoding what she thinks and feels in response to stimuli so that evil men can build better, smarter “emotional algorithms” that make them billions of dollars on the global market. We are Julia; Tau is Netflix.
Ugh, I know. Way too close to home.
The gig economy has a problem. Freelancing is increasingly common, but it’s still difficult and costly to access benefits without a 9-to-5 job. For the lowest-paid workers, it can be close to impossible.
In the past few years, many have seized on the idea of “portable benefits”: insurance and paid time off not bound to a single employer. In 2015, dozens of academics, entrepreneurs, and CEOs—including the cofounders and CEOs of Lyft, Handy, and Instacart—signed a manifesto calling for such a system. Last year, Senator Mark Warner (D-Virginia) introduced legislation that would offer grants to states, cities, and community groups to create pilot programs of portable benefits. In February, representatives in Washington state reintroduced a bill to create a state portable benefits system; soon after, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi cosigned a public letter affirming the need for such a system. But for all the talk, there’s been little action.
That’s beginning to change. Since March, Fair Care Labs—the innovation arm of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which organizes and advocates for domestic workers—has been quietly testing a portable benefits tool, developed with the help of a grant from Google.org. Domestic workers have long grappled with many of the issues plaguing the gig economy today. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which created the right to a minimum wage and overtime pay, initially excluded domestic workers; in the 1970s, the law expanded to include some domestic workers, but it still excludes babysitters and companions to the elderly. Domestic workers, like all independent contractors, cannot unionize or bargain collectively.
Over the past several years, states including California, New York, and Massachusetts have enacted laws granting domestic workers rights to overtime pay and paid time off; however, those laws are challenging to enforce, and there are still few federal protections. According to a 2017 study conducted in part by the NDWA, 23 percent of domestic workers are paid below their state’s minimum wage, and 70 percent earn less than $13 per hour. Like workers in the gig economy, most domestic workers are paid by multiple employers, none of whom is incentivized to offer benefits. In other words, the workforce is the perfect proving ground for a portable benefits system that could have broader applications.
Fair Care Labs’ tool, dubbed Alia, is initially designed for use by house cleaners, who typically work for a number of clients. Alia pools voluntary contributions from those clients, who each contribute at least $5 per cleaning; each cleaner can then use her pool of funds to redeem various benefits. Fair Care Labs has partnered with insurance company Colonial Life to offer life insurance, disability insurance, and accident and critical illness insurance. Workers can also redeem paid time off, at $120 per day.
In developing Alia, project lead Sam Witherbee spoke with dozens of cleaners, some who worked independently and others who worked through platforms such as Handy and Homejoy (before it shut down in 2015). They shared their stories about living without basic benefits like paid time off. He also spoke with people who hire cleaners—and learned that for the most part, they wanted to do the right thing. They just didn’t know where to begin. “If you make it easy, they’ll jump on it,” says Palak Shah, the founding director of Fair Care Labs and social innovations director at NDWA.
Workers using Alia describe the relief of having some sort of safety net, if small. Instead of continuing to work when they’re sick or delaying medical care, even workers without savings can take time off and see a doctor. “I wanted to have a backup plan, if something ever happened to me,” says Olivia Mejia, who has worked as a cleaner for 10 years and supports three children. With Alia in place, Mejia says, she was able to attend her daughter’s high school graduation this spring, which conflicted with her work schedule. In the past, she would have had to weigh the costs of missing a milestone event or missing a day’s pay.
Beyond domestic workers, such a tool could be used by any worker who receives income from multiple sources and does not have a primary employer that offers benefits. Indeed, even some clients of cleaners have found themselves eyeing the tool with their own affairs in mind. “I belong to a kind of professional class where I can afford to charge enough money to pay for” benefits, says Gretchen Hildebran, a freelance documentary filmmaker who contributes to a domestic worker’s benefits fund through Alia. “But it is very precarious, and it’s actually a huge amount of work to constantly be figuring them out for myself from month to month. To have something that was more stable and long-term would be amazing. I feel like it should be standard practice.”
Alia does not solve all the challenges faced by nontraditional workers. It notably does not offer health insurance, beyond critical illness insurance; the NDWA hopes to add a health-insurance option, but it’s proved a difficult nut to crack, and there hasn’t been huge demand for it from workers so far. And then there’s the fact that clients don’t have to contribute to the system. “A mandatory system would be better,” says Libby Reder, a fellow for the Aspen Institute’s Future of Work Initiative. She says requiring contributions would create “a lot more certainty and sustainability.”
A federal law of that sort may be a long way off, given the current Republican-dominated Congress. The bill reintroduced in Washington state this winter would mandate employer contributions to a portable benefits system, but it is stuck in committee. Similarly, Warner’s attempt to fund pilot programs for portable benefits has been stalled since last year, though it recently won two bipartisan cosponsors.
A tool like Alia could be significant for freelancers beyond just those working as home cleaners—“basically anyone working in different arrangements from the traditional 9-to-5 single employer,” Shah says. A freelance filmmaker like Hildebran could sign up clients to contribute an extra amount per project; an Uber or Lyft driver could theoretically sign up passengers mid-ride. Alia’s mere existence “makes it more difficult for people to say, ‘Ah, well, we just can’t figure out how to do it,’” says Elaine Waxman, a senior fellow in the Income and Benefits Policy Center at the Urban Institute.
Looking back at the first six months of 2018, there haven’t been as many government leaks and global ransomware attacks as there were by this time last year, but that’s pretty much where the good news ends. Corporate security isn’t getting better fast enough, critical infrastructure security hangs in the balance, and state-backed hackers from around the world are getting bolder and more sophisticated.
Here are the big digital security dramas that have played out so far this year—and it’s only half over.
In 2017, security researchers sounded the alarm about Russian hackers infiltrating and probing United States power companies; there was even evidence that the actors had direct access to an American utility’s control systems. Combined with other high-profile Russian hacking from 2017, like the NotPetya ransomware attacks, the grid penetrations were a sobering revelation. It wasn’t until this year, though, that the US government began publicly acknowledging the Russian state’s involvement in these actions. Officials hinted at it for months, before the Trump Administration first publicly attributed the NotPetya malware to Russia in February and then blamed Russia in March for grid hacking. Though these attributions were already widely assumed, the White House’s public acknowledgement is a key step as both the government and private sector grapple with how to respond. And while the state-sponsored hacking field is getting scarier by the day, you can use WIRED’s grid-hacking guide to gauge when you should really freak out.
In March, the Department of Justice indicted nine Iranian hackers over an alleged spree of attacks on more than 300 universities in the United States and abroad. The suspects are charged with infiltrating 144 US universities, 176 universities in 21 other countries, 47 private companies, and other targets like the United Nations, the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and the states of Hawaii and Indiana. The DOJ says the hackers stole 31 terabytes of data, estimated to be worth $3 billion in intellectual property. The attacks used carefully crafted spearphishing emails to trick professors and other university affiliates into clicking on malicious links and entering their network login credentials. Of 100,000 accounts hackers targeted, they were able to gain credentials for about 8,000, with 3,768 of those at US institutions. The DOJ says the campaign traces back to a Tehran-based hacker clearinghouse called the Mabna Institute, which was founded around 2013. The organization allegedly managed hackers and had ties to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Tension between Iran and the US often spills into the digital sphere, and the situation has been in a particularly delicate phase recently.
Data breaches have continued apace in 2018, but their quiet cousin, data exposure, has been prominent this year as well. A data exposure, as the name suggests, is when data is stored and defended improperly such that it is exposed on the open internet and could be easily accessed by anyone who comes across it. This often occurs when cloud users misconfigure a database or other storage mechanism so it requires minimal or no authentication to access. This was the case with the marketing and data aggregation firm Exactis, which left about 340 million records exposed on a publicly accessible server. The trove didn’t include Social Security numbers or credit card numbers, but it did comprise 2 terabytes of very personal information about hundreds of millions of US adults—not something you want hanging out for anyone to find. The problem was discovered by security researcher Vinny Troia and reported by WIRED in June. Exactis has since protected the data, but it is now facing a class action lawsuit over the incident.
Cloud leaks pop up regularly, but data exposures can also occur when software bugs inadvertently store data in a different format or location than intended. For example, Twitter disclosed at the beginning of May that it had been unintentionally storing some user passwords unprotected in plaintext in an internal log. The company fixed the problem as soon as it found it, but wouldn’t say how long the passwords were hanging out there.
After the revelation of a data exposure, organizations often offer the classic reassurance that there is no evidence that the data was accessed improperly. And while companies can genuinely come to this conclusion based on reviewing access logs and other indicators, the most sinister thing about data exposures is that there’s no way to know for sure what exactly went down while no one was watching.
Hackers breached Under Armour’s MyFitnessPal app in late February, compromising usernames, email addresses, and passwords from the app’s roughly 150 million users. The company discovered the intrusion on March 25 and disclosed it in under a week—some welcome hustle from a large company. And it seems Under Armour had done a good enough job setting up its data protections that the hackers couldn’t access valuable user information like location, credit card numbers, or birth dates, even as they were swimming in login credentials. The company had even protected the passwords it was storing by hashing them, or converting them into unintelligible strings of characters. Pretty great, right? There was one crucial issue, though: Despite doing so many things well, Under Armour admitted that it had only hashed some of the passwords using the robust function called bcrypt; the rest were protected by a weaker hashing scheme called SHA-1, which has known flaws. This means that attackers likely cracked some portion of the stolen passwords without much trouble to sell or use in other online scams. The situation, while not an all-time-worst data breach, was a frustrating reminder of the unreliable state of security on corporate networks.
At the end of May, officials warned about a Russian hacking campaign that has impacted more than 500,000 routers worldwide. The attack spreads a type of malware, known as VPNFilter, which can be used to coordinate the infected devices to create a massive botnet. But it can also directly spy on and manipulate web activity on the compromised routers. These capabilities can be used for diverse purposes, from launching network manipulation or spam campaigns to stealing data and crafting targeted, localized attacks. VPNFilter can infect dozens of mainstream router models from companies like Netgear, TP-Link, Linksys, ASUS, D-Link, and Huawei. The FBI has been working to neuter the botnet, but researchers are still identifying the full scope and range of this attack.
In the west of Belgium, near the French border, the A19 motorway ends in a four-lane, unfinished overpass. There’s no mountain here, no ocean, no city center. Nothing to explain why the heavy machinery stopped paving through the farms, and the traffic gets diverted to surface streets.
What stopped the Belgian government from paving over this landscape in the early 2000s was the insight that this land contained evidence that might reveal what it was like to live through one of humanity’s greatest horrors. During World War I, this stretch of pastoral landscape, which the generals (and now historians) called the Ypres Salient, was one of the most heavily trenched, mined, mortared, bombed, gassed, pillaged, burned, and bullet-riddled places along the Western Front.
For the archaeologists charged with recovering this landscape’s memories, digging into the past with a vast shovel-and-pickaxe party was out of the question. Not only is the Ypres Salient huge, its scars are so dense they practically form a contiguous strata in the soil. “And, this is an area where people live and plow,” says Birger Stichelbaut, an archaeologist at both Ghent University and the In Flanders Fields Museum. “Our goal was not to turn it into a World War I Disneyland.” They needed non-invasive ways to survey the landscape, identify important sites from the war, and plan for the best way to preserve or protect the artifacts therein.
So, like the armies of Europe a century earlier, they took to the field with the latest tech they could muster: lidar, aerial photography, and geophysical sensors. Their efforts, along with the stories and artifacts those efforts produced, are now featured in an exhibit at the In Flanders Fields Museum (through September) and an accompanying book, both titled Traces of War.
Amateurs and hobbyists had been digging up bullet casings, bones, and bunker material for decades. But the field of professional archaeology had never taken World War I seriously—it happened too recently and left a surfeit of historical evidence. That changed in the early 2000s, when the Belgian government planned to complete the long-delayed extension of the A19, connecting the city of Wieltje to a small town called Steenstraete, and then onward to the coast. However, the Belgian minister in charge of archaeological heritage recognized that meant cutting through what had once been one of the liveliest sections of the Western Front. This slice of the Ypres Salient hosted three major battles, including the one where German forces first used poison gas against the Allies.
So, the politician tasked archaeologists to scout the motorway’s planned route. What they came back with was staggering—trenches, artifacts, bodies. The government canceled the construction project and effectively declared the landscape to be a single, sprawling archaeological site. In the 2009 book Contested Objects: Material Memories of the Great War, Marc Devilde and Nicholas J. Saunders note the significance for the field:
“It is difficult to overestimate the significance of this political intervention, or its consequences for the archaeology of the war … After some 85 years of amateur ad hoc digging and land clearance—and in the space of just over 12 months—a modern scientific archaeology of the Great War had arrived in a legally constituted and academically acceptable form.”
Their most valuable resources were aerial surveillance photographs taken during the war. Thousands of these images, taken by both sides, survive. By comparing them to historical documents and modern aerial photography, Stichelbaut and his colleagues could identify areas of interest—a skirmish here, a sortie there. They found miles of forgotten trench lines, identified overgrown moonscapes of bombed out craters, and discovered evidence of supply lines, training grounds, and other key logistical points of interest.
The photographs, though, couldn’t capture every moment of the churning chaos, the horrors happening between each click of the shutter. Nor could modern flyovers find even a fraction of the war’s traces. Again, this part of Belgium is rural, covered by tree canopies, crops, and wrinkled with low ridges. As luck would have it, in the early 2010s, the Belgian government ordered a new aerial bombardment of the entire country.
Except these planes weren’t dropping bombs. They were firing lasers. Called lidar—think sonar, but with lasers—each beam of light bounces off the landscape below, and some of its photons return to the aircraft. By timing how long it takes those photons to make the round trip, the sensor calculates the elevation of whatever those photons touch. Geographers knit the resulting clouds of results into a 3-D map. The one the Belgian government released—for free!—in 2013 was accurate down to 30 centimeters.
Because some of those billions of photons slip past the trees and grass, geographers can also make maps of what the landscape would look like without vegetation. Maps archaeologists can use to look for traces of war without the cost, time, or intrusiveness of exploring by foot. And here, they got results. “This data has shown us that 12 percent of the landscape in our research area still bear features of the war, especially in woodland and pasture,” says Wouter Gheyle, an archaeologist at Ghent University who specializes in lidar imagery.
This 12 percent is pristine stuff. Many of these wooded areas hadn’t been messed with since the war. In one of the more remarkable lidar finds, Gheyle identified traces of where a small group of Allied soldiers made camp for the night, including the protective sandbags around the tents, in a copse of trees some seven miles behind the front.
Lidar found traces in farmland, too. Most of the trenches that zig zagged throughout this landscape were filled in and plowed over after the war. But when the lasers bounced off grassland they saw what had been hidden for decades—squiggles of trenches, divots of bomb blasts. “Now that the generation who actually witnessed the war has passed away, our only way to get in touch with the war is through the landscape,” Stichelbaut says.
Many of those witnesses remain with the landscape. Archaeologists have found hundreds of human remains; tens of thousands are still in the soil. The archaeologists have even been able to identify some and add their names to Ypres’ Menin Gate, memorializing the war’s dead. In 2016 they found the remains of Henry John Innes Walker, an army captain from New Zealand, whom they identified through a combination of archaeological evidence and historical record. He was killed in 1915. And while most of the dead remain anonymous, they still receive proper burials.
Stichelbaut is careful when discussing the scope of the Ypres Salient archaeological mission. “We are not interested in a single trench, rifle, or set of remains, but instead how the landscape is holding the story,” he says. The horrors of war reveal the humanity of those who participated.“This shows how life in the trenches really went, how soldiers dealt with the material culture they lived with,” says Stichelbaut. So no matter what road you take to visit, prepare to be stopped in your tracks.
Last month, the Trump administration announced that it would halt its policy of separating young asylum-seekers from their parents. For those Americans angered by their government’s cruel treatment of children as young as a few months old, this was a hard-fought victory. It came only after relentless lobbying of Congress; after the defection and shocking testimony of Department of Homeland Security contractors; after a torrent of heartbreaking images and videos and the work of a legion of activists, who shut down ICE facilities and even chased senior Trump officials from restaurants.
Emerson T. Brooking (@etbrooking) is a Washington, D.C.-based writer. Peter Warren Singer (@peterwsinger) is strategist at New America. They are the authors of LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media, to be published in October 2018.
The sinew that bound these efforts together was social media. More specifically, it was Twitter. Although only about one in five Americans use the fast-moving, foul-mouthed platform, it has become the cornerstone of modern US politics. It is where journalists gather facts and where the president puts his brain. It is where stories gather viral momentum before breaking out into the mainstream. Increasingly, it is also a battlefield, where competing armies of activists battle it out in “like wars,” seeking to define a contentious issue one hashtag at a time.
But Twitter also has administrators: a small group of real and fallible human beings. And this is where the trouble starts. In their efforts to disrupt the world, the masters of Silicon Valley are finding it harder and harder to stand apart from the politics of it.
Two incidents of Twitter policy-making stand out amid the fierce online lobbying effort against forcible family separation. The first came when software developer Sam Lavigne created a database of 1,500 ICE agents, drawn from publicly available data on LinkedIn, as well as a Twitter bot to push their personal information out to the world. Lavigne’s project was quickly banned for “doxing”—the sharing of an unwilling party’s personal information.
The second incident came when journalists at the left-leaning Splinter news organization acquired and published the cell phone number of Stephen Miller, a senior White House advisor and gleeful foe of immigration. The journalistic outlet’s Twitter account was promptly deactivated by administrators, effectively put in “Twitter jail.” As other Twitter users shared or retweeted the number, their accounts were also deactivated.
Soon enough, user accounts were being deactivated for simply sharing a link to the Splinter story—the kind of escalation typically used to block the spread of terrorist propaganda. Eventually, users were deactivated for merely noting the deactivation of other users. In an ironic twist, alt-right activists—many previously banned from Twitter for their embrace of violent white nationalism—returned to the platform long enough to help hunt down and report the offending users.
Neither of these events meant much for the millions-strong struggle to end the Trump administration’s internment of children. But to those of us who study Silicon Valley’s growing role in politics, they signal a great deal. They mark the most prominent occasions that Twitter—a service born from the progressive, free-speech ideals of early internet culture—has used its power to stymie activists on the left. That it comes during protests against 21st-century internment camps makes it all the more striking.
Although the founders of Twitter and all such services claim to administer their platforms as impartial observers, this was never really true. This small club of Silicon Valley titans has rapidly accumulated so much political power that any decision they make about the content that transits their platforms—even the absence of a decision—has a clear social impact. History would have taken a different course if Facebook had not hesitated to police viral falsehoods and Russian disinformation offensives until after the 2016 election, or if YouTube had not taken years to seriously study how its algorithms steered users toward terrorist content.
And when Twitter leaps to vigorously safeguard the privacy of government agents and high-level administration officials—the exact kind of protection it has been slow or unwilling to extend to journalists under similar threat—that decision also carries weight. It joins a pattern in which Twitter has prostrated itself to placate far-right media personalities, or looked past its own rules to justify playing host to the toxic tirades of the 45th president. Through these choices, a platform built to empower the crowd is increasingly becoming a sanctuary for the powerful.
Over the past five years, events have forced the traditionally apolitical titans of Silicon Valley to reckon again and again with their burgeoning political responsibilities. First was the terrorist use of their platforms, which saw carefree engineers sitting down to awkward meetings with senior US diplomats and military leaders as they discussed the particulars of beheading videos. Next was the election of Donald Trump amid an internet-empowered Russian disinformation operation, which showed that Silicon Valley platforms could be effectively weaponized against the nation of their birth. Third was the deadly 2017 white-nationalist rally at Charlottesville, fomented by social media, which shifted how the companies saw hate speech virtually overnight.
Right now, a fourth such revolution is brewing. From the outside, it is being driven by left-leaning activists who are horrified by the increasingly cruel policies of the Trump administration and who are using technology to fight back. From within, it is being driven by tech employees protesting their companies’ business with arms of the US government whose practices they abhor. And in the middle stand the administrators of Twitter and other platforms, who would like to do nothing so much as buckle down and weather the storm.
If the recent history of Silicon Valley and the Trump administration are any guide, it won’t work. Already, Wikipedia editors are debating whether the military holding facilities for families of asylum-seekers can better be described as “internment” or “concentration” camps. Soon enough, there will come a moment when the stakes are ratcheted even higher—when one too many immigrants die fleeing the US border patrol or tragedy strikes one of America’s new 100-degree tent-city internment camps—and the social media giants see themselves swept up in the protests and facing a moment of profound moral clarity. They will either aid the activists, taking a direct hand in political protests, or they will double down on their role as “neutral” platforms. Each course of action will represent a clear choice. Each will favor one side over the other.
On June 19, as anger over US-administered internment camps reached a fever pitch, Jack Dorsey, cofounder and CEO of Twitter, tapped out a simple question to his 4.2 million followers. “What are the highest impact ways to help?” he asked.
But Dorsey and his peers already know the answer. The real question is whether they are willing to accept the consequences. They hold the reins of the most influential communications systems on Earth. Through actions as small as featuring fundraising links on the homepages of their users to as large as fundamental shifts in their algorithms, they tilt the balance of our politics every day.
American government is in a sorry state. It will get worse. It is time for these “neutral” social media platforms, never particularly neutral to begin with, to cast aside their excuses and consider the greater good in how they govern their own digital empires.
WIRED Opinion publishes pieces written by outside contributors and represents a wide range of viewpoints. Read more opinions here.
Last week, some Republican senators decided to go to Russia and spend the Fourth of July meeting with lawmakers there in advance of an upcoming summit between President Trump and Vladimir Putin. It was also reported during Independence Day week, that Trump and Putin will meet without staff present, even though the Senate Intelligence Committee this week agreed with intelligence agencies that Russia tried to swing the election in Trump’s, and the Republicans’, favor. But that’s just one of the news bits the internet talked about last week when it wasn’t talking about fireworks. Here’s everything else that ignited social media over the last seven days.
What Happened: What is it called when you try and state one thing, but that very statement illustrates the very opposite? Let’s just agree that it’s called “Donald Trump tweet about tweeting.”
What Really Happened: Let’s start with something relatively light—as long as you can ignore the paranoia and gaslighting implicit in the inciting tweet, that is. On Tuesday, President Trump posted the following message on Twitter in a now-deleted (for reasons we’ll get to) tweet: “After having written many best selling books, and somewhat priding myself on my ability to write, it should be noted that the Fake News constantly likes to pour over my tweets looking for a mistake. I capitalize certain words only for emphasis, not b/c they should be capitalized!” (Important note: All spelling from the original has been maintained; hang on.)
You might be wondering if this was referring to anything in particular. The answer may be yes, to a certain degree; it wasn’t a capitalization issue per se, but the tweet followed the following kerfuffle over the term “Motor Cycle,” as opposed to the (correct) “motorcycle,” earlier that day.
As it was, the president’s defensive tweet set alarm bells ringing all across social media, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, that opening sentence caught a lot of people’s attention.
Here’s what The Art of the Deal‘s ghostwriter had to say about it:
And then, there was this one minor mistake that a lot of people noticed.
As themediastartedreportingonthetweet, even the dictionary couldn’t help but poke fun.
Don’t worry, though; his supporters had an explanation for this that isn’t the painfully obvious, “He doesn’t know the difference between ‘pour’ and ‘pore'” (which, really, isn’t such a terrible thing unless you expect your president to be literally faultless).
With moreandmore attention being given to the tweet by the media, at least some folks were able to appreciate the message for what it was.
To the surprise of no one, the tweet was deleted and replaced with a corrected one using “pore” within an hour.
The Takeaway: If only there was a good visual metaphor for the way this ended up going…
What Happened: Guess what? We’re not going to have Scott Pruitt to kick around anymore!
What Really Happened: Speaking of the Twitter habits of the Most Powerful Man on Earth: On Thursday afternoon, as the US was trying to settle back into the second half of its work week, President Trump dropped a surprise bombshell on the social media platform.
Ah, yes, Scott Pruitt—a man who seemedtoconsiderhispositionasheadoftheEnvironmentalProtectionAgencyasachallengetoseejusthowscandalizedonecouldmake the EPA.
By the time he stepped down, Pruitt had no fewer than 13 federal investigations into his conduct at the agency. Thirteen. Man, no wonder the president finally, finally asked him to resi—I’m sorry, what?
Oh, right. Asking people to resign when they are facing accusations of ethics violations isn’t something this president does. So, what made Pruitt decide to go at this point?
Sure, that could be it. Or maybe it was something someone else (or multiple someone elses) were up to?
Whatever the reason, it was maybethebiggestdomesticpoliticalnewsofthe the week. One of the highlights? Well, Pruitt’s resignation letter was … something else.
No matter how it happened, Pruitt has finally gone. Now it’s time for Andrew Wheeler to step in, whoever he is.
Oh, wait. Turnsout, he’smaybeworsefortheenvironment.
The Takeaway: Let’s just take a moment to appreciate this mental image though, shall we?
What Happened: What could be more American than protesting injustice? How about protesting injustice by climbing the Statue of Liberty?
What Really Happened: Here’s a message for the Americans in the audience: How did you spend your Fourth of July? Because there is someone who probably did it better than you, no matter how many fireworks you might have watched.
Yes, a woman climbedtheStatueofLibertytoprotestUSimmigrationpolicies. After a four-hour standoff, she was eventually removed from the statue by authorities.
Of course, her protest provoked admiration on Twitter.
The next day, as most Americans were recovering from the festivities (or wondering about Scott Pruitt), Therese Okoumou was in court.
She was also, as should only be appropriate, becominganewfolkhero. Next July 4th, maybe more people will protest instead of barbecuing.
The Takeaway: Meanwhile, what did President Trump think of Okoumou’s protest?
What Happened: Everyone who thought that immigration had been fixed when the president signed his executive order a couple of weeks ago got a rude awakening when an update on migrant children separated from their parents arrived.
What Really Happened: While we’re on the subject, let’s stick with US immigration, shall we? Last weekend, folks participated in massiveralliesacrossthecountryprotestingtheTrumpadministration’simmigrationpolicies.
Faced with this response—not to mention, a federal court order that demands that children under 4 are reunited with their parents by July 10, and children between 5 and 17 reunited with their parents by July 26—you might think that authorities were swiftly reducing the number of unaccompanied children in custody. As the head of Health and Human Services, Alex Azar, revealed last week, however, that’s not the case.
Not to worry, though; apparently, it’s definitely not the immigration authorities’ fault.
Azar’s update didn’tgodownwell, unsurprisingly.
Then this happened.
The Takeaway: Let’s turn our attentions to the leader of the free world. Mr. President?
What Happened: On the one hand, it’s a good thing that the forecast for a second civil war didn’t come to pass. On the other, we did get some comedy on Twitter out of it.
What Really Happened: We started on something light, so let’s end the same way. Alex Jones, the shouty man behind InfoWars and a Sandy Hook truther, took to Twitter at the start of last week to try and incite more fear amongst his fanbase.
On the face of it, it seems fairly ridiculous. But it did result in a hashtag, #SecondCivilWarLetters, in which people imagined just what a modern day civil war would be like. Tongues were, appropriately, in cheek, of course:
Attempts by others to detour the hashtag—or create alternates like #SecondCivilWarLetter or #SecondCivalWarLetters—were soon equally overrun by those unwilling to drop the joke.
As is only proper, the meme was noticedbythemedia, ensuring that order has indeed been restored.
The Takeaway: Of course, in reality, a second civil war would go very differently from the way most were imagining…
There once was a legendary troll, and from its hideout beneath an overpass of the information superhighway, it prodded into existence the internet we know, love, and increasingly loathe.
That troll, Ken ZZ03, struck in 1995. But to make sense of the profound aftereffects—and why Big Tech is finally reckoning with this part of its history—you have to look back even further.
In 1990, an online newsletter called Rumorville accused a competitor, Skuttlebutt, of being a “scam.” Skuttlebutt sued the online service provider that hosted Rumorville, CompuServe, for publishing false, damaging statements. A judge ruled that CompuServe was not responsible for content that it simply distributed.
A few years later, in the forums of another service provider—remember Prodigy?—an anonymous user called the firm Stratton Oakmont “a cult of brokers who either lie for a living or get fired.” Unlike CompuServe, Prodigy had tried to monitor its message boards. For that reason, when Stratton Oakmont sued, the court held that Prodigy was responsible.
The Feds needed an official policy. Tech lobbyists, who considered the Prodigy decision unreasonably restrictive, pushed lawmakers to adopt the CompuServe standard. They succeeded, and then some: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, passed in 1996, states that platforms are not liable for the content they host—even when, like Good Samaritans, they try to intervene. Ken ZZ03 would be its first test.
Days after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, Ken ZZ03 posted ads on an AOL message board for T-shirts celebrating the tragedy (“Visit Oklahoma … It’s a BLAST!!!”). To order, the ads said, call Kenneth Zeran, whose phone number was included.
Zeran was a Seattle-based TV producer and artist, and he had nothing to do with the ads. (Ken ZZ03’s motives and identity remain unknown.) Yet tons of people called to berate and threaten him, to the point that police were notified. Zeran asked AOL to take down the messages. AOL demurred. Zeran sued in 1996; a decision was reached in 1997. The judge, invoking Section 230, sided with AOL.
Ask many web scholars and they’ll tell you that Section 230 in general, and the Zeran case in particular, created the modern internet. CompuServe, Prodigy, and AOL became Google, Facebook, and Twitter, companies that have for years relied on Section 230 as a legal shield against claims of publishing abusive content.
Yet the law never could have anticipated the unchecked growth of Big Tech.
In the mid-’90s, AOL was just a bunch of guys “in an office park behind a Cadillac dealership” in suburban Virginia, said their then-lead attorney, Randall Boe, in a recent interview. “We had no idea what was to come.”
CompuServe’s attorney, Robert Hamilton, believes his winning argument was wildly misunderstood by the authors of Section 230, who gave platforms absolute immunity. “It was only a matter of time,” Hamilton says, before Congress would have to make amendments.
In March, Congress passed the first reform of Section 230 in 22 years, saying platforms can be found liable, but only if their users are participating in sex trafficking. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, who coauthored Section 230, didn’t support that particular bill but argued nonetheless that tech companies have failed to honor the spirit of the law. “In years of hiding behind their shields … too many companies have become bloated and uninterested in the larger good,” he said. Indeed, under Section 230, it’s fine for tech companies to act like Good Samaritans—they simply forget to.
As for Kenneth Zeran, he doesn’t think about the AOL case much these days. But, he says, “I always felt that I was correct—and that history would show that I was right.”
Michael Fitzgeraldis a writer and editor based in New York.
This article appears in the July issue. Subscribe now.
The Xbox One X is the go-to console for enthusiasts, with its faster performance and 4K HDR support. Especially if you invested in a 4K TV recently, this console gives gamers a great, high-res experience on the big screen. If you don’t have a 4K TV, it’s also a great time to get the Xbox One S, Microsoft’s affordable console for the rest of us.
Both Xboxes have a great library of titles, 4K Blu-ray playing capabilities, and support for all your favorite streaming services. Below are some of our favorite Xbox One S and Xbox One X console deals and bundles, along with some games and accessories you should try.
Since it’s been out for the better part of a year, we’re finally starting to see some smaller discounts on the Xbox One X (8/10, WIRED Recommends). If you were holding off, it’s a great time to take the plunge into the world of 4K HDR gaming.
Xbox One X 1TB + PUBG Bundle for $500 (Was $460) – Also available from the Microsoft Store for $499
If you don’t own a 4K TV, the Xbox One S is probably best for you. These deals don’t include bundled games, but they do have other perks.
Xbox One S Starter Bundle for $298 (Was $358) – Comes with 3 free months of Xbox Live, which lets you play multiplayer games online, and Xbox GamePass, which is a subscription that gives you a big collection of free games to play each month.
These Xbox One S deals are standard consoles bundled with select games, which may save you some money if it’s a game you like.
Xbox One S 1TB + Sea of Thieves + Another Game for $299 – Sea of Thieves is a simple game where you and a group of friends sail the seas together as pirates. It’s not perfect, but it’s a ton of fun as a group.
Xbox One S 1TB + Minecraft + Another Game for $299 – Got kids obsessed with Minecraft? They’ll love this Minecraft-themed Xbox One S, and you’ll get an additional game plus a second controller thrown in for free! You’d have to be a real Creeper to turn down this deal.
These Xboxes have special coloring or are limited edition.
Xbox One S 1TB Minecraft Edition + Ping Controller + Free Game for $299 – If you at all like Minecraft, this console and controller look amazing, and you get a second controller and a free game for a rather normal price.
Xbox One S 2TB Gears of War 4 Red Edition (Refurbished) for $290 (Was $300)
This is not a comprehensive list by any stretch, but these are a few of our favorite Xbox games. If you’re looking for some great games to play, this list is a good place to start.
Celeste for $20 – Read WIRED’s Review.
While you’re shopping for a new console, why not add some extras? Microsoft’s awesome Elite Controller is back in stock, and we think it’s just about worth its $149 price tag.
Read our Best Wireless Gaming Headsets for headset recommendations for Xbox One. The Turtle Beach Stealth 600 wireless headset is a stellar accessory to pick up.
Finally, we recommend grabbing an external 2TB USB hard disk if you need more space for an Xbox One X or S model.
That’s it, for now! We’ll update this list as we discover new deals.
When you buy something using the retail links in our stories, we may earn a small affiliate commission. Read more about how this works.
As the Milky Way was growing, taking shape, and minding its own business around 10 billion years ago, it suffered a massive head-on collision with another, smaller galaxy. That cosmic cataclysm changed the Milky Way’s structure forever, shaping the thick spirals that spin out from the supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s core. Two new studies—one published in June, another still under peer review—describe the evidence for this previously unnoticed event.
Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.
“This is a big step forward,” said Elena D’Onghia, an astrophysicist at the University of Wisconsin who is unaffiliated with the new research. “It’s interesting because we can finally see what the history of the Milky Way is.”
To uncover evidence of the collision so many eons later, astronomers have to work like galactic archaeologists, sifting through myriad sources of surviving information to piece together a story consistent with the available evidence. Both research teams relied on data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia space telescope, which has spent years gathering exceptionally rich biographies of millions of stars—not only their locations and motions, but for many, their brightnesses, temperatures, ages and composition as well. They essentially created high-resolution and multidimensional maps of the Milky Way and used these maps to find anomalous populations of old stars that appear to retain a memory of the long-ago collision. “The Gaia results really are allowing us to see things in the galaxy that we maybe suspected were there but haven’t seen,” said Kathryn Johnston, an astrophysicist at Columbia University.
Hints of a dramatic collision had been seen before, but the indications had been inconclusive. A distinct clump of unique stars would have been a giveaway that they’re interlopers from elsewhere, but no such evidence exists. The long-ago collision so thoroughly shook things up that the telltale stars have been strewn throughout the galaxy. “There’s debris everywhere,” said Vasily Belokurov, an astronomer at the University of Cambridge and a leader of one of the two teams. “You’re basically surrounded by that debris now.”
He and his team found a large number of stars that aren’t moving in step with the galaxy’s rotation. Instead, they move in radial orbits, streaming toward or away from the center of the galaxy. These stars are also rich in “metals”—the catch-all description astronomers give to any element heavier than hydrogen, helium or lithium. Metal-rich stars likely descend from many previous generations of stars. They’re the scions of stars from a long-ago galaxy that smacked into the Milky Way, their orbits still reflecting the odd trajectory of that cosmic agitator.
“If you throw a stone in a pond, those ripples last for awhile. In an analogous way, if you shake the Milky Way disk, even billions of years ago, it can take awhile for that response to settle down,” said Johnston.
Belokurov’s group also modeled different collision scenarios, as well as a possible quieter history without significant collisions. An impact of a small “dwarf” galaxy indeed could have deposited a cloud of stars like the ones seen today, they found. Their work was published online earlier this month in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The other group, led by Amina Helmi, an astronomer at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, based its study on a newer, larger data set from Gaia and included a more detailed analysis of the chemical properties of the stars. The abundance of iron, produced by supernova explosions, relative to elements like magnesium, generated by massive yet short-lived stars, yields clues about the history of the galaxy up until the present day. Helmi and her team used this data to conclude that the Milky Way’s inner region contains hints of debris from an ancient galactic impact. They named this ancient galaxy Gaia-Enceladus.
The collision could help resolve a longstanding question about the structure of the Milky Way. The galaxy’s spiral disk of stars is actually made of two parts: a thinner, denser region encompassed by a thicker, more diffuse region. Astronomers aren’t sure how this thick disk came about. Perhaps those stars came from another galaxy, or they’re stars from the thin disk that have interacted with one another and migrated outward over time. Helmi and Belokurov’s work suggests that instead, the Gaia-Enceladus collision ejected thin-disk stars out into the thick disk. “If this collision happened to the young Milky Way, then it would damage the stellar disk, smash it up, and send stars up to high galactic heights,” Belokurov said.
The investigation continues. Both groups are uncertain about how big Gaia-Enceladus likely was and exactly when it fell into the Milky Way. And no one can say for sure how our galaxy’s disk got heated and puffed up into a thicker one. “We don’t understand how important the impact is alone, but now we have a culprit” that could have created the thick disk, Johnston said. “What would be really exciting would be to look carefully in the disk and trace back this event and see if we’re able to find a more direct effect that’s still going on, a leftover echo.”
Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.
The annual iOS refresh is on the way—Apple has previewed it, beta testers have installed it, and the rest of us should get iOS 12 when iPhones arrive in September. While features such as winking 3-D emoji and screen-time limits for your apps might take much of the attention when the software arrives, iOS 12 is a major step forward in one other crucial area: smartphone security.
It’s something Apple has always prided itself on, with its tightly locked App Store and full device encryption, but iOS 12 is going to make your iPhone more secure than ever before. Here’s how.
Many of you have probably set up two-factor authentication on your most important accounts, and if you haven’t you really should. It means you need something else beyond a username and password—typically a code from your phone—to log into your account on a new device.
That makes life harder for a hacker who has somehow obtained your login credentials, but it also makes life a little more inconvenient for you if you do a lot of logging in across a lot of devices. iOS 12 eases that pain with a new feature called Security code AutoFill.
When a 2FA code comes into your iPhone via SMS, in iOS 12 it will automatically pass over to the app that’s requesting it onscreen, so there’s no need to switch between apps or copy numbers over. Ultimately, it makes 2FA easier to adopt, and every little bit helps.
Safari on iOS already blocks third-party cookies, which can recognize you across multiple websites, as well as first-party cookies—those specific to one site—that are older than 30 days. Unless you’re regularly logging into a site, it doesn’t know much about you.
In iOS 12, Safari will go even further: By default, it will block comment boxes and social media sharing icons that can identify you even when you’re not interacting with them.
As it stands now, a Facebook Share button on a page outside of Facebook can spot who you are, and it can link the page to your Facebook account, even if you don’t actually share anything. As long as you’re logged into Facebook in your browser, the code embedded in the Share button registers your arrival.
Not for much longer though, as far as Safari on iOS is concerned: When the browser detects this kind of tracking, it’ll give you the option to allow or block it.
In addition, Apple will take a stand against “fingerprinting” in Safari on iOS, the practice by which ad trackers can recognize you from the unique fingerprint of your device; the hardware data fed through the browser, the browser configuration, and so on. Even if a tracking code doesn’t know exactly who you are, it can spot your device and start to build up a picture of your browsing patterns as your device visits multiple sites. iOS 12 will restrict this, too, in Safari.
Apple’s anti-tracking tech will come to Safari for macOS in the upcoming Mojave release as well.
Better, stronger password management will come to Safari in iOS 12 as well. The browser and its integrated password storage system can already keep your login credentials safe, and it already suggests passwords made of up random characters if you need a new one.
In iOS 12, Apple says Safari will start suggesting stronger passwords, though it’s not immediately clear what that means. Another new feature coming down the line is an alert that displays when two or more of the logins you’ve saved in Safari use the same password—bad security hygiene for a number of reasons—and prompt you to change one of them to something else. Thanks to iCloud, all these passwords and logins will sync across Apple devices.
Encryption is everywhere in iOS, from the text chats you send through iMessage to the location data logged by apps. Without the passcode or fingerprint or face you’ve assigned to your iPhone—which act as the decryption keys—the data can’t be read.
It also means that iMessage and FaceTime chats heading from and arriving to your iPhone can’t be spied on. That’s peace of mind if you spend a lot of time connected to public Wi-Fi at the local coffee shop. Not even Apple can look at your FaceTime calls, even if it wanted to.
FaceTime will get a long-awaited group video calling feature with iOS 12, so you can hold video calls with up to 31 other people at once. Like the existing one-to-one calls, full end-to-end encryption will be applied.
Since it first previewed iOS 12, Apple has announced a partnership with RapidSOS, a startup working to upgrade many of the roughly 6,500 emergency call centers across the US. As a result, when you call 911, your iPhone will securely and automatically share your exact location with the call center operator.
On many 911 calls, seconds can make the difference between life and death. Being able to transmit a phone’s location without any effort from a panicky, flustered caller could prove vital, especially if someone is ringing while away from home in an unfamiliar area. Apple had previously developed a location technology called HELO, which pinpoints where you are more effectively than cell-tower data can. The RapidSOS partnership will ensure that HELO data gets into the hands of operators, regardless of what software their call center runs.
When someone wants to hack into your iPhone without your permission—whether it’s a criminal saboteur or a law enforcement agent—they often do so via some kind of brute-force approach, making multiple attempts at entry in quick succession.
With iOS 12, Apple is drastically narrowing the window of time in which that can be effective. If an iPhone isn’t unlocked for an hour, it will switch the Lightning port to a charging only state, neutralizing attempts to pull data from it.
The previous time limit was seven days, so an iPhone running iOS 12 will block access much more quickly—most likely before anyone has even tried to start cracking the stolen or seized handset.
Surfing the web used to feel a lot more like actual surfing. Grab your (key)board, paddle out, and spend some time bobbing in the calm waters of the worldwide web.
Now? It’s a bit like trying to surf a tsunami. Our devices buzz and bleep for our attention all day long. Our brains are permanently frenzied. Sitting through an entire video or reading an entire article online now seems impossible without opening another tab or reaching for another device. It’s no longer about catching a wave and riding it to the shore; it’s about keeping our heads above water.
What happened? Have we lost ourselves out there, or has the internet fundamentally changed? The answer is both. And since we can control the internet about as well as we can control the ocean, the only immediate option is to look deep into ourselves and change what we do online.
When you feel yourself starting to panic from a flurry of notifications or become dizzy with distractions from our always-on technology, guide yourself to the calmer seas of the “slow web.”
Slowing down online comes in many forms, but became a movement several years ago. The information superhighway had become so fast—too fast to make sense of the bombardment of information—that some decided it was time to set speed limits. In 2012, writer Jack Cheng described the idea as the “slow web.” He argued that our sense of time online had become warped. We mindlessly scroll for so long that we easily lose track of what we’re doing, what we’re consuming, or what any of it means. We’ve been trained to “power browse,” skipping from tweet to tweet, from one short video clip to the next, struggling to keep our heads above water. The only remedy is to slow down.
It’s a simple idea. In fact, Cheng has since disavowed it for being too simple. “The ‘Fast Web’ seems today to be even faster, more frenetic, more addictive,” he wrote in a 2016 update to his original post. “I no longer believe that anything this complex and systemic can be solved by a set of user-experience practices alone.” Regardless of Cheng’s soft about-face, the slow web movement suggests we should read the news, check our email, or browse the web on our own timetable, resisting the immediate and overwhelming nature of modern technology. It also suggests we should spend our time online doing things that satisfy us. Forget “junk food” apps, like Facebook. The “slow web” is all about experiences we can really savor: reading one long article rather than skimming a thousand tweets, or catching up with friends who live far away rather than thumbing through Instagram.
My personal “slow web” preference? Watching train videos on YouTube. With a few keystrokes, I’m on a train traveling through Bulgaria, watching the pastoral landscape unfurl out the window. I can easily hop over to a train in Sweden, or Sri Lanka, or Santa Fe, all boarding from the same platform: YouTube. These slow, quiet videos contain no music, no message. Only hours of footage and the invitation to teleport somewhere else.
This is an exercise in patience. It’s all too easy to spend hours staring at YouTube as algorithmically generated recommendations feed more and more content into the queue. But to spend hours deliberately looking out a window—virtual or otherwise—is another thing entirely. It requires mental fortitude and endurance. A capacity for boredom. It challenges you to resist opening another tab, to avoid checking for notifications, and to merely observe the landscape before you.
Platforms like YouTube often embody the “fast web”: deep, black voids of mindless entertainment. But they can also give us access to a world much wider than our own. Hidden within the systems designed to capture your eyeballs and seize your attention, there is also a capacity to watch slowly and mindfully.
There is a certain art to sitting down—even in front of a screen—and spending a few minutes meditating on a grassy knoll in England, or joining a stranger on a stroll through Tokyo just as cherry blossoms begin to bloom. One of my favorite “slow web” videos captures the train ride from Bergen to Oslo, a seven-and-a-half hour journey along the spine of Norway. There is no music. No narration. Just seven and a half hours of lakes and mountains, farmhouses dotting the hillsides, snow-dusted mountains, and the occasional interruption of the train conductor announcing the next stop.
I haven’t watched the video in one sitting—even on the slow web, seven and a half hours of screen time seems gluttonous. But I do return to it often, picking up at different stations, like a hop-on, hop-off train ride to another part of my brain. On days when I feel anxious from notification overload or panicked about the news, these virtual vacations remind me of the promise of early web: a way to make the world feel smaller, a way to feel less alone. I can be somewhere else in just a few keystrokes.
Finding this kind of peace doesn’t have to involve train rides. Virtual walking tours of cities work well, too. One WIRED editor likes to watch episodes of NHK World’s Cycle Around Japan, a meandering travel show about touring Japan on a bicycle. Another watches the Royal Ballet’s live rehearsal broadcasts. Whether it’s demi plies or hours on the train, the objective remains the same: It’s nice to suspend yourself from tech overload and teleport yourself somewhere else. In an age of despair, it’s one way to remember what the internet was designed to do.
Westworld just wrapped up its second season on HBO, and even after 20 episodes, fans of the show like science fiction editor John Joseph Adams are still no closer to understanding how the show’s guns are able to kill robots but not humans.
“The creators must have some idea how these guns work,” Adams says in Episode 316 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “Could someone tell us? I want to know what they think, how they work. Because it doesn’t make any sense to me.”
Season 2 includes a passing reference to “sim bullets,” which makes Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtley think that there must be something special about the bullets themselves.
“Maybe all the bullets have little incendiary things in them that cause them to self-destruct if they’re flying in the direction of a guest,” he says. “But in one scene they just hold the gun right against someone’s chest, and I don’t see how the bullet’s not going to kill you from that range, even if it is sort of programmed to self-destruct.”
Writer Sara Lynn Michener wonders if maybe it’s the guns that are special rather than the bullets. “You can have a gun that has paintball bullets in it, and you can have a gun that has real bullets in it,” she says, “and the gun determines, ‘All right, who am I aiming at?’, and decides which bullet to release based on that.”
But science fiction author Anthony Ha says that even if there is an explanation for how the guns work, he still doesn’t understand how humans are kept safe from other weapons such as arrows and axes.
“It definitely drives me crazy,” he says. “Do they have safeties on the swords here too? What is going on with this?”
Listen to the complete interview with John Joseph Adams, Sara Lynn Michener, and Anthony Ha in Episode 316 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.
Anthony Ha on confusion:
“There are basically two main timelines, but what that overlooks is that there are also flashbacks and—we learn later—flash forwards within those timelines too, so it’s not the same as just tracking these two parallel paths. And I think that also ties to the point about some of the plots kind of spinning their wheels, particularly the timeline that’s further advanced and taking place after this flood. There really was not a lot of plot there, so I didn’t understand why—from both a narrative economy and clarity perspective—they didn’t just treat it as a frame story that you see in the first and last episodes. But the fact that you would flash back to that every episode or two and just have Bernard standing there looking disoriented, kind of furrowing his brow and everyone being like, ‘Why don’t you remember anything?’ It did kind of get old after a while, while also, I think, contributing to the confusion.”
Sara Lynn Michener on Westworld’s rich characters:
“There are these [wealthy] characters, who are, obviously, kind of awful people, and they went in deciding that they wanted to have this done to them. And then they realized that as soon as they give up the right to their bodies—because they want to participate in this, because they want to reap the rewards—they’re in this hell. Because they’re no longer in charge. They have signed over their intellectual property—literally—to the corporation. … And now they have been reduced to being slaves themselves in these realities that they bought and paid for, not realizing what they had actually signed up for, not realizing the implications. So I liked that, I liked all the moralizing of, ‘You made your bed and now you have to lie in it.’”
Sara Lynn Michener on religion:
“The difference in perspective between me and Dave might be because I was raised religious. Because being raised religious means you are raised in a very specific kind of bubble, where everything that you are told about the nature of reality turns out not to be true. Imagine being raised as a child believing in Santa, but your whole life is about Santa—not just Christmas. And so I feel like I am much more attracted to science fiction that just wants to go full-on metaphysical and talk about how we define these realities and how we decide what’s real, and I’m less interested in the specific details that make it feel real to me. I’m more interested in, ‘Why do the guests feel like it’s real? Why do the hosts feel like it’s real?’”
John Joseph Adams on ratings:
“The thing that depresses me is that [Westworld] will be seen as this standard-bearer for science fiction, as all big attempts to tell science fiction stories tend to be, so when one fails, or doesn’t perform up to expectations, it’s an excuse for other producers or networks not to pursue science fiction shows. … When a show like this doesn’t do as well, it’s more evidence that, ‘Oh no, we shouldn’t put more money into a brainy science fiction show, because people won’t watch it.’ Especially with the struggles that The Expanse has had. So I think it’s bad news in general for people who want brainy science fiction that this hasn’t done better, unfortunately.”
Life is full of little disappointments. That’s why it’s so refreshing to occasionally see someone do something grand, and just a bit nutty. Like Elon Musk setting up a fully functional production tent in the Tesla’s factory’s backyard, in a improbable—and thus far successful!—bid to hit his 2018 production targets. Like Lyft, the little brother of American ride-hailing, spending $250 million on…bicycles? Like a developer taking a polluted ex-Ford factory in Minnesota and trying to turn it into a walker-friendly, net-zero energy planned community. Like the mere existence of the Polaris Slingshot, which is not quite a car and not quite a motorcycle, but tells us some important things about the future of transportation.
This week, it was all about lofty goals. Let’s get you caught up.
Stories you might have missed from WIRED this week
With a little help from a final assembly line set up in a parking lot, Tesla hits its Model 3 production target—only about eight or so months behind schedule. CEO Elon Musk, always one for an exceedingly ambitious goals, responds with a new one: 6,000 Model 3s a week by the end of August.
The bike-share war went into high gear this week, when Lyft officially announced it had acquired the country’s largest bike-share operator, Motivate. The buy gives the ride-share company control over big-name systems like DC’s Capital Bikeshare, NYC’s CitiBike, and the Bay Area’s Ford GoBike. But it also gives it an all-of-the-above strategy for transportation domination—and some interesting bits of street corner real estate to play with.
Last month, a Cruise Chevy Bolt being driven manually bumped into a Cruise Chevy Bolt in autonomous mode. Kinda hilarious, sure, but the minor incident has lessons to teach about the challenge of building self-driving car tech.
From the ashes of an old Ford manufacturing plant rises a bold, green vision for the future of Minneapolis/St. Paul: a highly bikeable, net-zero energy community. But will the plan get past its neighborhood opposition—and are its promises even reasonable?
Transportation editor Alex Davies learns the Polaris Slingshot—not a car, not a motorcycle—is a terrible commuting partner. But it’s real fun when you get out of your routine and just drive. As autonomy begins to take over later this century, this fun part may be exactly the sort of driving activity that survives.
If you thought Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom had a lot of dinos, check out this gathering. Over 150 Dinos—Ferrari Dinos, that is—got together in the automaker’s hometown of Maranello, Italy this week, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the beloved car’s road debut.
News from elsewhere on the internet
Reuters gets inside Tesla’s sprint to hit its goal to produce 5,000 Model 3s in one week.
Meanwhile, Musk got very angry with reporters on Twitter, and also vowed to send Boring Company and SpaceX engineers to Thailand, to help a children’s soccer team that is trapped in a cave.
The Information reports that Uber’s attempt to merge with Middle Eastern ride-hail rival Careem is falling apart.
China may cut the incentives it uses to encourage adoption of electric vehicles by a third, reports Bloomberg.
Baidu rolls out its new AI chip, and plans to build fully self-driving buses.
The Verge asks: Will deep learning ever be good enough to power self-driving cars?
The American trade war against China ramps up, with China imposing tariffs on US pork, soybeans, and yes, autos.
Once a year, the bucolic grounds of Goodwood House in West Sussex, England, are consumed by the smell of exhaust fumes, the sound of engines revving, and an excited crowd of 100,000 people, all wanting a look at the special cars on show. They gather here because Charles Gordon-Lennox, the 11th Duke of Richmond, likes to occasionally open his home to host the Goodwood Festival of Speed, a celebration of all the history, the heritage, and the future of motor racing.
This week, among the supercars, hypercars, and pure racing cars, Goodwood visitors will spot a low, black machine streaking in near silence up the winding driveway to the estate, which for the event is transformed into a 1.16-mile hill climb track.
“We’re pretty sure when the car appears, people will freak out,” says Rod Chong, deputy CEO of Roborace. And it will be the first machine to give the hill climb a try without a human in command, so there are some nerves. “We aren’t sleeping very well right now,” Chong says.
Robocar is an autonomous race car developed by Roborace, which is starting the world’s first motorsports series for self-driving cars. Its vehicle doesn’t have the constraint of keeping a human driver safe, so the design team—led by Daniel Simon, known for his work on Tron: Legacy—dropped the cockpit and whittled away the central spine of the vehicle. The wheels flare out at the corners, behind huge aero ducts.
Roborace first unveiled its car in February 2017, with long-term plans to build a whole bunch, and pit them against one another on a track. The design uses four electric motors for a total of more than 500 horsepower. As in most self-driving prototypes, a computer tries to make sense of the world with input from lidar, GPS, cameras, and radar. Teams who want to race will use the same hardware platform but will design their own software, looking for a racing edge.
Robocar was built to run on professional race courses used by Formula E, the electric racing series with which Roborace is associated. It’s designed for neat and tidy pavement, clear road edges, and immobile crash barriers that can be used as reference points. Here, it will have none of those things. “The challenge with Goodwood is that it’s a temporary structure that only gets built up the week of the event,” Chong says. His car will have to contend with indistinct grass curbs and protective hay bales that might move if someone else crashes into them or they get kicked by the crowd.
The first big test at Goodwood comes Monday, when the team will run the track in a private test, ahead of the show days on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. “Monday is the first time we’ll have tested in the real environment,” says Bryn Balcombe, Roborace’s chief strategy officer.
The biggest issue the team anticipates is the trees. The canopy is so thick over the driveway that satellite GPS signals can’t make it through the leaves, which means the car won’t be able to accurately map its position. Instea, the team has written software for the hill climb that relies on lidar laser sensors for real-time environment perception. Luckily, running on the Formula E race track last December in Hong Kong gave them some experience to build on. There, the tall buildings posed a similar obstacle to GPS reception.
At Goodwood, the Roborace team plans to run the course very early each morning, before things get started, just to rescan it and check if any bales have shifted. Then they’ll run the car in whatever slot they’re assigned, in between the groups of touring cars, 1950s Formula 1 cars, the road-going racers, and whatever other magnificent vehicles make the trip.
For this year’s outing, the team isn’t looking to set any records. They’ll be happy just to drive, and complete, the course three days in a row. That’s not to say they’re taking it slow. “We want to run to a good level of speed—it’ll be visually exciting, believe me,” Chong says. But really it’s a proof of concept and a chance to remind a petrol-head crowd that the future might be electric and autonomous, but it will definitely still be fun.
It was a holiday week for July Fourth, but there was still plenty going on in the security world. WIRED took a deep look at a budding partnership between the Army’s Cyber Command and the Pentagon’s Defense Digital Service group. DDS brings private-sector tech expertise to the government, and this new collaboration adds Army technologists to the mix to work on difficult development challenges for the Department of Defense. Meanwhile, a different DOD program run by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency provides mobile, desktop, and browser apps to dozens of US defense agencies through an ultrasecure app store that has some crucial differences from commercial platforms.
WIRED also looked at where Congress and the Supreme Court may take privacy precedent and regulations in the future as digital technologies alter the privacy landscape. Speaking of which, find an hour this weekend to do a quick and easy audit of your mobile and desktop apps. Check up on what data they’re able to access and collect from you, and make sure you’re not running any programs that are overreaching.
There’s more! As always, we’ve rounded up all the news we didn’t break or cover in depth this week. Click on the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.
Facebook announced on Monday that a programming bug caused the service to briefly unblock a number of accounts that users had blocked. The glitch reportedly affected a small portion of Facebook users for just a week—but at the scale of Facebook, even “small” mishaps can have massive repercussions. The company said it notified a whopping 800,000 users that they may have been affected.
While the bug was live, affected users could have had accounts they previously blocked message them or see things they shared with mutual friends, although the accidentally unblocked accounts still couldn’t directly see a user’s page. Facebook wouldn’t provide any additional information about the bug, but for people who rely on blocking to keep them emotionally and/or physically safe, the incident is more than just a minor hiccup.
On Tuesday, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence published findings of a review of the 2017 Intelligence Community official assessment, which concluded that Russia did interfere in the 2016 US presidential election to support Donald Trump’s candidacy. After reviewing documents and intelligence and interviewing investigators, analysts, and other officials, the committee found that the IC had produced “a sound intelligence product.” The committee released an unclassified report and also prepared a classified version. The review was launched last year amid doubts about the IC’s findings. It noted a couple of small things it would have wanted the IC to investigate further, including the role of the Russian-controlled media outlet RT. But overall, the report raised few questions or concerns.
Bugs abounded this week, with another problematic one in which some recent models of Samsung smartphones, including the Galaxy Note 8 and Galaxy S9, were reportedly texting out photos from users’ camera rolls to random contacts without leaving a trace of the errant messages. The bug seems to have been in the Samsung Messages app, which is the default texting app on Samsung mobile devices. The problem may have been related to interoperability issues as carriers upgrade to the new Rich Communication Services protocol that the industry plans to use as a replacement for SMS texting. Samsung users found some workarounds for the issue, including revoking permission for the Samsung Messages app to access their photos. Samsung said it was aware of the reports.
In Boots Riley’s trippy new film Sorry to Bother You, hunger is the main throughline. The hunger for truth. The hunger for justice. The hunger to succeed personally, and even more so in one’s professional life. At RegalView, a low-level telemarketing firm in Oakland, one path to success presents itself in the form of code-switching. The disaffected Cassius Green (LaKeith Stanfield) is hungry to prove himself.
He’s a damaged soul eager for anything other than failure and hardship. On the advice of a coworker (Danny Glover), Cassius begins to use a “white voice” when speaking with prospective customers—what white people “wished they sounded like,” Glover explains—and its pay-off is immediate. Cassius becomes the company’s top salesman, earning the title of “Power Caller” and a promotion upstairs, where it’s required he talk in his white voice at all times.
But professional advancement comes with a moral clause. Cassius is wedged between doing what is right and what is profitable; one reason he took the job in the first place was to help his uncle save his home, which was in foreclosure. These are questions of survival Riley is volleying at us—what, exactly, are you willing to give up for the American Dream? Your friends? Your principles? For someone like Cassius, there are always conditions to Making It. For black people, in particular, success has its own fine print.
Sorry to Bother You is a deliciously untame thing: an allegorical satire about the exploitation of labor and land. (It joins a cohort of black futurity coming to the screen in recent years, including Get Out by Jordan Peele and Random Acts of Flyness, which debuts in August on HBO; Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death is also in development at HBO.) Like reality, the film is a genre mash-up in the most satisfying of ways—part workplace comedy, part existential drama, with elements of science fiction. The movie’s heart centers on economic injustice and class struggle. It’s heavy stuff, and rightfully so. These are heavy times. But longtime activist and rapper Riley, who wrote and directed the film, never burdens the audience with too much at once: he garnishes the film’s steady unease with splashes of dark humor courtesy of its leading cast (an exceptional Stanfield, Tessa Thompson, and Armie Hammer).
The tsuris surrounding Cassius worsens as coworkers form a union and threaten RegalView brass with a strike. “Trouble’s already here,” Squeeze (Steven Yeun), the lead organizer, says at one point. “I’m just helping folks fix it.” But it’s too late for Cassius; intoxicated by the taste of success, he refuses to join their cause, even as his artist girlfriend, Detroit (a radically enchanting Thompson), finds his new situation at odds with her own beliefs. (According to one of her t-shirts: “The future is female ejaculation.”)
Riley’s gonzo dystopia begins to unfurl in greater detail once Cassius settles in on the executive level, where he sells slave labor “over the phone.” RegalView, as it turns out, is part of a larger corporation called WorryFree Solutions. Its deranged visionary of a CEO, the bro-y, coked-out Steve Lift (a role Hammer was destined to play) offers people lifetime employment, housing, and food in exchange for non-stop labor. WorryFree, however, is anything but paradise. Individuals who sign up live in prison-like accommodations, eat scraps, and work as indentured servants for the rest of their lives. It’s a perverse critique of human capital—the gig economy, mass incarceration, an underpaid workforce in one sinister illustration—and an existence that doesn’t feel too far from what one possible future holds in false utopias like Silicon Valley. In this, Riley gives us one of the year’s sharpest pieces of political art. Sorry to Bother You arises from the best kind of fiction, one inspired from the fury and turbulence of real life.
In the film’s final and most revealing act Cassius is stirred from slumber. After a one-on-one meeting with Lift takes an absurd turn, he’s forced to reconsider the cost and question of his success (I won’t spoil the surprise here). For his part, Riley reconstructs the do-anything pursuit of capitalism into a collage of racial horror. The conclusion is both shocking and oddly poetic, but never once did it read as unbelievable. Throughout, the film’s aims remain locked on the issue of hunger. Only, in the end, Riley isn’t afraid to take it one step further and show how the powerless, and people of color in particular, no matter how much fight they put up, ultimately get swallowed whole.
