Tag: Technology

She keeps watch over one of the largest databases of missing persons in the country. For Meaghan Good, the disappeared are still out here, you just have to know where to look.

Just like handwriting survived long after the introduction of print, paper is still very much part of our internet-era economy.

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in business, tech, and science writing.

Online harassment is as serious as offline harassment, and it rarely stays “only” online.

I haven’t peeked at eBay in years, and apparently I’m not the only one who’s forgotten it exists.

Hiroshi Ishi­guro has spent his career creating robots. But does he know enough about humans to make them lifelike?

The mysterious creator of bitcoin asks a journalist to help reveal his identity.

The Facebook CEO is in control of his company. He could just use a little more confidence.

Nathan Wessler, a lawyer with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, monitors a government that increasingly monitors its citizens.

Fifty years ago, the Freedom of Information Act gave the public access to government secrets — all you had to do was ask. How a simple request became a bureaucratic nightmare.

The internet is not pleased with start-up bros who want to “disrupt” bodegas.

Some tech companies are taking a stand against neo-Nazi users, but claim it’s a still dangerous decision to make.

The nine flight-team engineers of the 1977 mission have been putting off retirement to see through one of NASA’s most successful spacecraft all the way to the end.

Is it because we don’t want to, because we can’t, or is there something else at play?

Tech wizards may say they want driverless cars or the hyperloop, but what they really, really want is a bus.

Smartphones have altered the texture of everyday life, digesting many longstanding spaces and rituals, and transforming others beyond recognition.

Ev Williams admits that the internet is broken and suggests course corrections, apologizing for Twitter’s role in putting Trump in the White House.

Big brains offer no advantage in the animal kingdom.

Why do we love reading about CEOs behaving badly? Perhaps it’s because we identify with their exhausted workers.

Ben Popper takes a look at Koko, a startup with an app that helps people connect and provide emotional support to peers and, in the process, allows them to recognize and “rethink” their own problems.

The story of Google’s groundbreaking, buzz-generating modular smartphone — aka Project Ara — from bang to whimper.

The stakes of inventing and occupying fictional worlds have always been high — which explains why we were so fascinated with virtual reality already in the 1990s, when the technology was still in its pre-infancy.

On the new triangle trade, and the surprising connection between modern slavery and ecological disaster.

In a new story for Wired, Bijan Stephen looks at how the Black Lives Matter movement uses social media to organize and fight for change. As Stephen writes, “any large social movement is shaped by the technology available to it,” tailoring their goals and tactics to the media of their time. For the nascent Black Lives Matter […]

Sherry Turkle studies how we relate to our devices, and thinks it’s high time we start talking to each other again.

In the summer of 2013, a New York yuppie lost her iPhone in the Hamptons. A few months later, she got an alert saying that her phone had been turned on in Yemen, and then candid pictures of a Yemeni family started filling her iCloud account. The phone was soon updated under the name of its new owner, a teenager […]

They have astonishingly well-paid jobs that they don’t like. Some plan to stay only until their options are vested. Then they will move on to their “actual” careers. This population of the possessed waiting to be dispossessed spends an inordinate amount of time comparing the gourmet kitchens of different website headquarters. The top digital companies […]

When we think about futurism, more often than not it’s robots and hoverboards that spring into our minds.

Maybe it’s no surprise, then, that many tech workers in San Francisco turn to psychics for a glimpse of the future. Or that psychics, in turn, are rebranding themselves as spiritual therapists, executive coaches, and corporate counselors. The trend is common enough to be spoofed on HBO’s Silicon Valley, where the show’s fictional tech CEO confers […]

What does the rise of the drone mean for justice, for the ethics of heroism, for psychology? Most important of all, who is dying and why?