Wired Magazine 31.12/32.01 Mirai Zack Snyder

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Wired Magazine 31.12/32.01
Dec 2023 / Jan 2024
148 pages

Featured articles: “How to Create a Monster: Young Hackers and Mirai”; “Under the Radar: Archaeological Technology”; interview with Zack Snyder; interview with Jennifer Doudna; “Gift Guide for 2023”; “The Trouble with Online Therapy-Speak”; “Citizen Surveillance Cameras”; and much, much more! See contents pages.

The Wired mission is to tell the world something they’ve never heard before in a way they’ve never seen before. It’s about turning new ideas into everyday reality. It’s about seeding our community of influencers with the ideas that will shape and transform our collective future. Wired readers want to know how technology is changing the world, and they’re interested in big, relevant ideas, even if those ideas challenge their assumptions—or blow their minds.

Readers Harangue Harassers And Hold Forth On Creative Integrity.
RE: “CONFESSIONS OF A VIRAL AI WRITER” It is troubling to contemplate the coming future, where writers avoid AI to keep their creative process “pure” but readers don’t really care that content is AI-generated. We can already see this in art. —@artbyvikram AI writing is just glorified flarf, and although it is entertaining, it loses its relevance quickly. It is a short-lived experience, just like the lifespan of all machines. In other words, AI is the new kitsch. —@jmartinezisgood We need to start thinking more abstractly. We are built of feelings and symbols. We know when things are uncanny valleys. We need to start thinking beyond the recognizable again. If it makes sense, it’s AI. If it doesn’t—it’s human. —@msawyerballance RE: “A WRINKLE IN TIME” A long-held pet peeve of mine has been that cars are obviously designed…

GROWTH ENGINEER
IF KATE KALLOT has her way, small-scale farmers across Africa will soon be able to access the power of artificial intelligence and satellite technology. Her mission is to help them maximize yields of cassava, coffee beans, and other crops that form the backbone of the continent’s economy. From the Nile Delta down to the Cape of Good Hope, a constellation of six satellites will keep watch over the 11.7 million square miles of the continent, monitoring soil quality, moisture, and vegetation. The data collected will then feed a machine-learning model that’s designed to measure crop health and predict yields for the season. At the ground level, farmers will receive SMS alerts warning them of potential flash floods, pest infestations, and other factors that will affect their crops. Kallot is the CEO of…

EYE ON THE UNIVERSE
WHAT WOULD YOU do with the world’s biggest camera? Probe the very structure of the universe? That’s what, come 2024, scientists at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile will finally get to do. The observatory, named for the late astronomer and dark-matter pioneer, is under construction at the 9,000-foot peak of Cerro Pachón in the Andes. It will house the largest digital camera in history, a telescope with a massive 8.4-meter-wide mirror, and a fast-pivoting mount to peer into the universe as never before. “The major strength of this technology is to see faint objects and the dynamic universe—things that are changing,” says Sandrine Thomas, deputy director of construction at the observatory. “That gives us a lot of information about the beginning of the universe, galaxies, and objects in our…

THE AUDACIOUS GUTS OF JENNIFER DOUDNA
I SEE YOU, READER. You drink the probiotic seltzer, with its gut-improving bacteria, and the fiber-filled prebiotic. You regularly consume eclectic fermented foods and burly amounts of kale to diversify those precious microbes in your digestive tract. Because, after all, what isn’t the microbiome responsible for? It’s been all the rage for the past few years, with scientists hoping it could help treat everything from immune disorders to mental illness. How exactly that will work is something we’re just starting to explore. This spring, the effort got a boost when UC Berkeley biochemist and gene-editing pioneer Jennifer Doudna, who won a Nobel Prize in 2020 for coinventing Crispr, joined the pursuit. Her first order of business, spearheaded by Berkeley’s Innovative Genomics Institute: fine-tuning our microbiome by genetically editing the microbes…

NONE
OF THE THREE YOUNG MEN WHO BUI LT MIRA I FIT the profile of a cybercriminal, least of all Josiah White, who could lay perhaps the most direct claim to being its inventor. Josiah had grown up in a rural county an hour south of Pittsburgh. He was the youngest of four children in a closeknit Christian family, all homeschooled, as his mom put it, to better “find out how God had created them and what he had created them to pursue.” She describes the thin, dark-haired baby of the family as a stubborn and independent but unusually kind child, who would sit beside the new kid in Sunday school to make them feel welcome. Josiah’s father was an engineer turned insurance salesman, and the family lived in a fixer-upper surrounded…

UNDER THE RADAR
In the center of Siena, Italy, a cathedral has stood for nearly 800 years. A BLACK – AND – WHITE layer cake of heavy stone, fine-cut statuary, and rich mosaics, the imposing structure—now visited by more than a million tourists each year—would seem to be a permanent fixture of the city’s past, present, and future. Most people call it, simply, “the cathedral.” But Stefano Campana, a 53-year-old archaeologist at the University of Siena, calls it something else: “the church that is visible now.” Campana has seen his fair share of excavations, along with the dust and sunburns that accompany them. But archaeology, for him, is not always about digging up the past; it also means peering down into it using an array of sensitive electromagnetic equipment. One device Campana uses is ground-penetrating…

ALL THE FEELS
THERE’S AN EPIDEMIC of loneliness, haven’t you heard? The causes seem obvious: the pandemic, climate change, wars, so much more. But we’ve been here before as a species. This isn’t the first time Everything Happened Too Much All at Once. What’s different is the way a lot of people are soothing themselves, via crowdsourced therapy on social media. Whether it’s people using therapeutic language to describe garden-variety social phenomena (“gaslighting,” for instance, has become a synonym for “lying” or “misleading”), or actual therapists dispensing advice through Tik-Tok or retweet-ready articles about, say, how we’re surrounded by malignant narcissists, these practices can have perverse effects. To be sure, articles excoriating the “weaponizing of therapy-speak” have multiplied in the past year or so. But the backlash often skirts the heart of the problem: social…

FOSSIL FUELED
LEGO HAS BUILT an empire out of plastic. Its bricks weren’t originally made from wood or metal. Ever since company founder Ole Kirk Christiansen bought Denmark’s first plastic-injection molding machine in 1946, Legos have been derived from oil. Today the many billions of little bricks the company churns out each year are mostly made from acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, or ABS, which neither biodegrades nor is easily recycled. If a minifig escapes into the wild, it will likely shed microplastics for decades or even centuries. What was once considered a miracle material—so versatile, tough, and easily dyed in a searing array of hues—has come to haunt Lego, a family-friendly brand valued at more than $7 billion. Concerns about climate change and pollution have made fossil-fuel-derived plastics increasingly taboo, sparking a rush to find…

START
Dear Cloud Support: “I kind of want to live in the metaverse. There will be all the same stuff as my regular universe—friends, work, shopping, entertainment—but it will somehow be more thrilling. When I move, will I still be myself?”—Virtual Horizons Dear Virtual, It’s hard to believe that only two years have passed since we were promised the new dispensation—the digital universe where, as Mark Zuckerberg put it, we would “be able to express ourselves in new, joyful, completely immersive ways.” In the metaverse, brain surgeons in Scotland would operate on patients in New Zealand, and friends would gather in simulated space stations, luxurious alpine retreats, and enchanted forests. The soaring promo video at 2021’s Meta Connect suggested that the metaverse would remain untainted by the limitations of the real world—even, perhaps, the…

THE VIOLENT SWEETNESS OF ZACK SNYDER
MORE TAXIDERMIED ANIMALS live in Zack Snyder’s office than seems normal. A lioness. A beaver. A duck. Also a wide collection of axes, swords, and guns—the weapons used to fell the wild beasts, maybe? The effect should be unsettling, but it isn’t, because Snyder himself is warm, chatty, accommodating. And the space, tucked into a mountainside in Pasadena, California, turns out to be less a man cave than a fan cave: Snyder’s shrine to his creative life. The swords and guns are merely props from his movies, like Babydoll’s katanas from Sucker Punch. The photo of Wonder Woman above the sofa, where she’s holding a few severed heads? Huge and sepia-toned, it’s oddly alluring. Being in Snyder’s office, in fact, is a bit like watching one of his many stylized shockfests:…

FOR
BRIAN KREBS, SEPTEMBER 22, 2016, WAS AN inconvenient day to become the target of the most powerful DDoS botnet in history. A construction crew had been replacing the siding on Krebs’ rural house in Northern Virginia all morning. The incessant hammering was freaking out his dog, who responded as if barbarians were laying siege to their home. Krebs worked as an independent investigative reporter and security researcher—one of the best known in the cybersecurity industry. He had no workplace to escape to. “I was already losing my mind,” Krebs says. It was only a little later that day, Krebs says, that it started to become clear that his dog was not wrong. He was, in fact, under siege. And the barbarians were winning. Two nights before, Prolexic, the service that provided his DDoS…

GOLF GOES WILD
HUMONGOUS SCREENS. 40-SECOND SHOT CLOCKS. RECONFIGURABLE GREENS. AN UPSTART SPORTS LEAGUE IS BETTING ON TECH TO REACH A WIDER (AKA YOUNGER) AUDIENCE. JUST DON’T CALL IT AN ESPORT. CAMERON YOUNG SLIDES a driver from his bag. He stares at a hole referred to as Texas Hill Country. It’s new to him—a par 4 with sand hazards and rough to avoid. The 26-year-old is in the top 20 in the Official World Golf Ranking, but he’s not sure how to proceed. He turns to his companion, former pro Roberto Castro. “What’s going on here?” Young asks. Castro consults with their caddie and reports, “It’s 312 to that bunker there.” Young makes clean contact. The ball lofts skyward. But there’s no sky above him. On this steamy day in late October, Young is in an air-conditioned soundstage…

P1EAS3 L0G 1N
I BELIEVE, WITH total conviction, that the tech industry should stop absolutely everything else it is doing—self-driving cars, large language models, spyware, teledildonics—and figure out how to stop making me log in to everything all day. I would passionately love to return to an era in which the most important software tool I use is something besides my password manager. If you are young, you may not remember the days when you would turn on a computer and … frankly that was it. You may only know the new world of infinite login chains: Wake up, hold phone to face, check email, find that the email app has decided you need to log in, open password manager, log in to that, and so on. Repeat the process for your work laptop,…

IT’S ALWAYS TIKTOK O’CLOCK
JETTYJAMEZ AND AutumnRaynn have been live on TikTok for more than three weeks straight. In that time, spanning more than 500 hours, nothing much of note seems to have happened in their apartment, but a lot has happened with the people watching. The young couple has as many as nine cameras around their home: several in the bedroom, including one taped to the ceiling that stares down menacingly at the bed, a few in the living room, and even one above the toilet. If they leave the house, they take the audience with them. Their stream presents all of the camera angles in a grid, and at any given time thousands of people may be watching and commenting. Over the weeks, their audience has skyrocketed to over 2 million followers. For some…

WISH LIST 2023
Read more expert reviews at wired.com. Contributing product reviewers: Boone Ashworth, Michael Calore, Julian Chokkattu, Nena Farrell, Scott Gilbertson, Simon Hill, Matt Kamen, Christopher Null, Adrienne So, Louryn Strampe, Ryan Waniata, and Jeremy White. Photo assistant: Taka Mark Kasuya BLESSED BE THE FRUIT The Raspberry Pi debuted a decade ago as a tiny computing platform for tinkerers and hobbyists. Now the 4-inch circuit board has grown powerful enough to serve as a household’s primary computer. The Pi 5 is twice as fast as the previous model, with a new 2.4-GHz CPU, a more efficient GPU, and an updated power management controller, all made with custom silicon developed by Raspberry’s in-house engineers. There’s support for dual 4K displays this time too. Users pushing their Pi hard 24/7 will want to spend an extra $5…

EARLY
IN THE MORNING ON OCTOBER 21, 2016, SCOTT Shapiro got out of bed, opened his Dell laptop to read the day’s news, and found that the internet was broken. Not his internet, though at first it struck Shapiro that way as he checked and double-checked his computer’s Wi-Fi connection and his router. The internet. The New York Times website was offline, as was Twitter. So too were the websites of The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, the BBC, and Fox News. (And wired.) When Twitter intermittently sputtered back online, users cataloged an alarming, untold number of other digital services that were also victims of the outage. Amazon, Spotify, Reddit, PayPal, Airbnb, Slack, SoundCloud, HBO, and Netflix were all, to varying degrees, crippled for most of the East Coast of the United…

IN
IN THE YEARS AFTER HE SAT IN HIS CONNECTICUT home and watched his digital life implode, Scott Shapiro became a kind of Mirai fanatic. The Yale Law professor eventually read the source code that Paras published on Hack Forums, printing it out, poring over its mechanics, and marveling at its well-polished design. Years later, he would write a case study of Mirai in his book Fancy Bear Goes Phishing, which tells a history of the internet through a series of extraordinary hacking events. Among other things, Shapiro now sees the Mirai case as a rare model of actual restorative justice in cybercriminal law. It shows, he argues, a positive alternative to putting young hackers in prison when, in many cases, their online behavior contrasts so sharply with their real-world selves. Yes,…

There’s Always Another Video
JUST WHEN THE PEOPLE of San Francisco thought they’d seen every video—the sidewalk drug runners, the Louis Vuitton mob heisters, the men selling stolen laptops, the smash-and-grabbers snatching a camera from a Prius in traffic, the porch pirates porch pirates porch pirates into infinity, all indexed in the “Lawless San Francisco” section of the great internet video store—yes, just then: Stig Strombeck took out his cell phone camera on April 5 and hit Record. It was around 7 pm, and Strombeck was on his way to his second job. He’d parked on Lombard Street. Not the famously crooked section up over the hill, but the wide gauntlet that jets toward the Golden Gate Bridge through the Marina district: the preppy hood of woo girls and boat guys and early-career Gavin Newsom…

TURNING THE DIAL, THE SUN FLICKERED
—@anelectricpoet, via Instagram Honorable Mentions We assembled it. It disassembled us. —Chris Colborn, via email Astroarchaeologists find original Venus fly trap. —Bill Brown, via email The object looked to be smiling. —Geoff Sowrey, via email It keeps repeating, they are coming. —@dfeehely, via X The orb opened. Flesh began unfurling. —@rossvdw, via Instagram Game of fetch knows no size. —@Heavyshark1, via X Countdown began when oceans were drained. —@MiroLeite, via X Inhale it to unsheathe the blade. —@RthurDouglass, via X Just like us, aliens lose sunglasses. —@MommieWeirdest, via X It knew we would unfind it. —Markus Wüstenberg, via email Want to submit a six-word story for us to consider? Look for the latest story prompt on Facebook, X, Instagram, and wired.com/six-word, where you can also see how we have illustrated past favorites.

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