Dead Media Beat: early rollouts of the Moscow-Washington Hot Line

Five hauntings from the other side of technology.

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.

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.

“There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has abused this system more than Microsoft,” Vice President JD Vance said on Thursday.

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

Amid a wave of backlash, some industry-friendly groups are employing creative and time-tested strategies to woo the youth.

The fanfic site could be down for weeks due to a “security incident.” Users are not taking it well.

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.

Warhound came out of stealth on Wednesday with $200 million in funding and a mission to create “elite working dogs” equipped with "advanced body armor."

From the Senate to governors’ mansions, candidates are trying to outcompete each other to be the most anti–data center in races across the US.

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

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.