Dead Media Beat: French pneumatic postal services

Five hauntings from the other side of technology.

TikTok and other sites were told to curb protest footage and AI-altered images, while online retailers like Vinted and eBay reportedly signed an agreement stop looted goods from flooding resale sites.

The death of a lab worker in Russia has authorities looking at whether plague played a role. Even if it did, though, the odds of it spreading are very low.

a certain kind of person writes in all lowercase now. why?

Online spaces are captured by oligarchs and saturated with slop—and they’re exacerbating humanity’s worst impulses. It’s time to start over.

The metric might not mean much to laypeople, but leap seconds have been a source of contention in the timekeeping community for years. Now, they’re dead.

Bluesky tells WIRED it blocked links to a leaked archive of information on 41,000 ICE, CBP, and other DHS workers because it contains people’s contact information, shared without their authorization.

The data center buildout could cause a massive increase in gas prices as companies scramble for limited supplies and infrastructure fails to meet demand.

The US government’s Tradewinds initiative has made it easier to throw millions of dollars at “nontraditional” defense contractors, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

These elusive and reactive particles have been challenging to hold on to and even more challenging to study, but a new method paves the way for tests on the differences between matter and antimatter.

In a world of AI Overviews, Wikipedia usage declines. But the real loss may be far more existential than website traffic.

Soon, hundreds of new top-level domains, including .meow and .fart, could be added to the internet. WIRED goes inside the backroom shenanigans of ICANN, the organization at the helm.