Around dinner time one night in May, a student in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Googled “Obergefell v. Hodges ruling.” But instead of a list of links to information about the landmark US Supreme Court case that legalized same-sex marriage, the 11th grader from La Cueva High School was redirected to a …
Read More »ChatGPT Spit Out Sensitive Data When Told to Repeat ‘Poem’ Forever
Brinkmanship escalated in the US Congress this week over strategies to reauthorize the government surveillance powers known as “Section 702,” as civil rights groups sounded the alarm about the consequences of the program and its potential renewal. A WIRED investigation of more than 100 restricted Telegram channels indicated that the …
Read More »OpenAI’s Custom Chatbots Are Leaking Their Secrets
You don’t need to know how to code to create your own AI chatbot. Since the start of November—shortly before the chaos at the company unfolded—OpenAI has let anyone build and publish their own custom versions of ChatGPT, known as “GPTs”. Thousands have been created: A “nomad” GPT gives advice …
Read More »A Civil Rights Firestorm Erupts Around a Looming Surveillance Power Grab
United States lawmakers are receiving a flood of warnings from across civil society not to be bend to the efforts by some members of Congress to derail a highly sought debate over the future of a powerful but polarizing US surveillance program. House and Senate party leaders are preparing to …
Read More »A Controversial US Surveillance Program May Get Slipped Into a ‘Must-Pass’ Defense Bill
Rumors are rampant on Capitol Hill about an effort said to be underway by US congressional leaders to salvage a controversial surveillance program—a plan that sources say may include slipping a last-minute provision into a “must-pass” defense authorization bill. Republican and Democratic senior aides tell WIRED that word of private …
Read More »Go on a Psychedelic Journey of the Internet's Growth and Evolution
When you're browsing online, you probably don't pay close attention to the URLs in the address bar of your browser, much less the IP addresses of the sites you're visiting or your own internet connection. But behind the scenes, the Internet Protocol is the key network communication and routing mechanism …
Read More »Twitter’s Former Head of Trust and Safety Finally Breaks Her Silence
It’s 8 pm on a recent night this fall, I’m finally unwinding, and Del Harvey is texting me. Again. This time she’s sending a screenshot of tense tweets exchanged between the supreme leader of a nation-state and the official Twitter account of a rival nation-state. I respond with a prompt: …
Read More »Secretive White House Surveillance Program Gives Cops Access to Trillions of US Phone Records
A little-known surveillance program tracks more than a trillion domestic phone records within the United States each year, according to a letter WIRED obtained that was sent by US senator Ron Wyden to the Department of Justice (DOJ) on Sunday, challenging the program’s legality. According to the letter, a surveillance …
Read More »Cybersecurity Industry Baffled by FBI’s Lack of Action on Ransomware Gang
If you work at a spy agency tasked with surveilling the communications of more than 160 million people, it’s probably a good idea to make sure all the data in your possession stays off the open internet. Just ask Bangladesh’s National Telecommunication Monitoring Center, which security researchers found connected to …
Read More »A Spy Agency Leaked People's Data Online—Then the Data Was Stolen
The list of data is long. Names, professions, blood groups, parents’ names, phone numbers, the length of calls, vehicle registrations, passport details, fingerprint photos. But this isn’t a typical database leak, the kind that happens all the time—these categories of information are all linked to a database held by an …
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