This article was taken from the June 2013 issue of Wired magazine. There have always been hackers. If we look back 30 years to the earliest days of the personal computer, the first iteration were DIY types with cobbled-together devices, tinkering in garages and basements and meeting periodically to share their stories. Their intentions were […]
Grand thinking created the Internet, small thinking won’t save it. Though we’re racing forward at break neck speed to connect all the objects in our physical world — the tools we need to run our society — to the Internet, we still fundamentally do not have the trustworthy computing required to make it so. Of the 6,494 words President Obama uttered […]
Crime is down in advanced economies around the world—at least that is what some statistics suggest. While it is true that violent crime has dropped precipitously in the developed world over the past two decades, in fact, there is a tsunami of criminal activity on the horizon. It is in the form of cybercrime, and […]
The U.S. government is surreptitiously collecting the DNA of world leaders, and is reportedly protecting that of Barack Obama. Decoded, these genetic blueprints could provide compromising information. In the not-too-distant future, they may provide something more as well—the basis for the creation of personalized bioweapons that could take down a president and leave no trace… […]
This article was taken from The WIRED World in 2016 — our fourth annual trends report, a standalone magazine in which our network of expert writers and influencers predicts what’s coming next. When most people think of cybercrime, they think of hackers raiding bank accounts, stealing identities and pilfering credit-card numbers. Ah, the good old […]
In the not so distant future, every object in your life will be online and talking to one another. It’ll transform the way we live and work – but will the benefits outweigh the dangers? If we think of today’s internet metaphorically as about the size of a golf ball, tomorrow’s will be the size […]
Remote-controlled aircraft and robot technology can be used for bad just as easily as for good. Americans know their government uses unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, on military and intelligence missions from surveillance to assassination. But drones are no longer the sole domain of the military, and just as with many new technologies, they […]
Criminals deftly exploit the data deluge. While businesses around the world struggle to understand the how to profit from the information revolution, one class of enterprise has successfully mastered the challenge—international organised crime. Though the recent theft and hacking of tens of millions of customer accounts at Sony has garnered much attention, the attack is […]