In a sunlight-filled classroom at the US State Department’s diplomacy school in late February, America’s cyber ambassador fielded urgent questions from US diplomats who were spending the week learning about the dizzying technological forces shaping their missions. “This portfolio is one of the most interesting and perhaps the most consequential …
Read More »The Problem the US TikTok Crackdown and Kaspersky Ban Have in Common
On July 20, the United States Commerce Department will ban new sales of popular antivirus software made by Moscow-based Kaspersky Labs. The move comes just two months after US president Joe Biden signed a law that will effectively ban the social media app TikTok in the US if its Chinese …
Read More »Google Is Piloting Face Recognition for Office Security
WIRED learned this week that Amazon Web Services investigated claims that the AI search startup Perplexity may have violated the cloud company's rules by appearing to pull data from websites that have attempted to shield themselves from such scraping. The news comes after WIRED published findings last week about the …
Read More »The US Wants to Integrate the Commercial Space Industry With Its Military to Prevent Cyber Attacks
THIS ARTICLE IS republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. The US military recently launched a groundbreaking initiative to strengthen ties with the commercial space industry. The aim is to integrate commercial equipment into military space operations, including satellites and other hardware. This would enhance cybersecurity for military …
Read More »Inside a Violent Gang's Ruthless Crypto-Stealing Home Invasion Spree
Cryptocurrency has always made a ripe target for theft—and not just hacking, but the old-fashioned, up-close-and-personal kind, too. Given that it can be irreversibly transferred in seconds with little more than a password, it's perhaps no surprise that thieves have occasionally sought to steal crypto in home-invasion burglaries and even …
Read More »Quora’s Chatbot Platform Poe Allows Users to Download Paywalled Articles on Demand
Poe, an AI chatbot platform owned by the question-and-answer site Quora and backed by a $75 million Andreessen Horowitz investment, is providing users with downloadable HTML files of articles published by paywalled journalistic outlets. Prompting the service’s Assistant bot with the URL of this WIRED story about the AI-powered search …
Read More »Amazon Is Investigating Perplexity Over Claims of Scraping Abuse
Amazon’s cloud division has launched an investigation into Perplexity AI. At issue is whether the AI search startup is violating Amazon Web Services rules by scraping websites that attempted to prevent it from doing so, WIRED has learned. AWS spokesperson Patrick Neighorn confirmed the company's investigation of Perplexity following a …
Read More »Surprise! The Latest ‘Comprehensive’ US Privacy Bill Is Doomed
The persistent surveillance under which most Americans reside appears likely to continue unabated after federal lawmakers pulled from consideration on Thursday a privacy bill that legal experts contend has little hope of protecting anyone’s privacy. United States lawmakers who’ve flirted for years with the idea of offering Americans a semblance …
Read More »War Crime Prosecutions Enter a New Digital Age
In 2012, the al-Qaeda–linked jihadist group Ansar Eddine swept through Timbuktu, taking control of the Malian city. As part of the group’s imposition of sharia law over the residents, it created an Islamic police force, led by Al Hassan Ag Abdoul Aziz. Ansar Eddine controlled the city until 2013, when …
Read More »Deepfake Creators Are Revictimizing GirlsDoPorn Sex Trafficking Survivors
This article contains descriptions of sex trafficking and abuse. Discretion is advised. For years, nonconsensual deepfake pornography has been used to harass, silence, shame, and abuse women. Celebrities and influencers have their faces implanted into existing adult videos; men have used the technology to place “friends” into explicit videos; and …
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