A cryptocurrency promoted in January by US first lady Melania Trump was part of a sophisticated fraud that “leveraged celebrity association and ‘borrowed fame’ to sell legitimacy to unsuspecting investors,” a new legal filing has alleged. In April, crypto investors brought a federal class action lawsuit against Benjamin Chow, cofounder of crypto exchange Meteora, and…
Google employees working at the company’s Chelsea campus in New York City received a notice on Sunday alerting them to a possible bedbug outbreak at the office. Exterminators arrived at the scene with a sniffer dog “and found credible evidence of their presence,” according to an email obtained by WIRED. The email was sent to…
When Chinese AI startup DeepSeek became a global sensation in January, it not only shocked Silicon Valley but also startled ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company. The Chinese tech giant had already launched Doubao, its own flagship AI assistant app with tens of millions of users. But when DeepSeek became the best-known Chinese AI company overnight, no…
The GHF was created in early 2025, having emerged from conversations between individuals such as Eisenberg, Tancman, and consultant Yotam HaCohen—who, like Tancman, is a part of COGAT. They were reportedly concerned that Hamas was stealing aid meant for civilians, however, an analysis by a USAID agency found no evidence of this. Through conversations with…
Rollercoaster Tycoon wasn’t the most fashionable computer game out there in 1999. But if you took a look beneath the pixels—the rickety rides, the crowds of hungry, thirsty, barfing people (and the janitors mopping in their wake)—deep down at the level of the code, you saw craftsmanship so obsessive that it bordered on insane. Chris…
The following sentence might make a globalist cry out for joy: A toy that is manufactured by a Chinese company in Vietnamese factories, designed by a Dutch artist in Belgium, inspired by indie toy culture in Hong Kong, and made viral thanks to a Thai K-pop star, has turned into the biggest Gen-Z cultural trend…
Aarian Marshall: Hello. Michael Calore: Given today’s topic, I’m curious to know what is the most unexpected thing you’ve both ordered through a delivery app? Louise Matsakis: So I was on a press trip to China recently, and I was taking notes during an interview, and I got pen all over my white pants. So…
The bottom line is that, unlike the US, China is not a country of immigrants. In 2020, only about .1 percent of the mainland population was made up of foreigners, according to one estimate by researchers from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. That’s roughly 1.4 million people in a country of more than…
Here at WIRED, we tend to stick to journalism. We talk about our work to anyone who will listen—during podcasts, on social media, over dinner with our politely listening friends—but we tend to confine our bragging to the scoops we get, the stories we write. For our new politics issue, though, we decided to do…
After a six-week work trip, Xiayun, an employee at a semiconductor company in Silicon Valley, had landed at her hometown in China for vacation when she saw the news about H-1B visas. On Friday afternoon, US president Donald Trump signed a proclamation saying that any H-1B visa holder’s entry into the US will be “restricted,…