Those allegations of murders-for-hire, in fact, dissuaded the first Trump administration from granting clemency to Ulbricht. The White House in 2020 considered freeing Ulbricht but ultimately rejected the idea because of the alleged role of violence in the case, according to one former government official involved in the process who spoke to WIRED on condition…
The video game industry has been in a troubled place for the past year, with studio closures and job security at the forefront of developer concerns. Increasing layoffs with seemingly no end paint a bleak picture for devs, while companies are busy pumping money into AI initiatives. According to a new report from the organizers…
In this sense, claims Jacob Silverman, coauthor of Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud, the TRUMP coin setup seems to bear some of the hallmarks of a “classic memecoin pump-and-dump”—a manoeuvre whereby an issuer keeps hold of large amounts of their coin, promotes the project, then cashes in their holdings,…
For decades, choosing an emoji has been constrained to what’s available on your smartphone’s keyboard. Every year brings new emoji—I like the “face with bags under eyes,” though that one is still rolling out. But there are times when the preinstalled options just aren’t specific enough. Thankfully, Apple has a solution, and it’s called Genmoji….
Less than 24 hours after going dark, TikTok says it has come back online after President-elect Donald Trump gave the company’s service providers—presumably Apple, Google, and Oracle—reassurance that his administration wouldn’t enforce a law banning the app in the first place. “In agreement with our service providers, TikTok is in the process of restoring service,”…
Howdy subscribers! Thank you to all the readers of WIRED’s AI Unlocked newsletter who tuned in for our most recent conversation about money and artificial intelligence scams. I had a blast interacting with readers and answering more questions live. If you missed the broadcast, a full recording is available here for you to watch anytime…
There was a time when Mark Zuckerberg didn’t regard mainstream media as the enemy. He even allowed me, a card-carrying legacy media person, into his home. In April 2018, I ventured there to hear his plans to do the right thing. It was part of my years-long embed into Facebook to write a book. For…
The Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu—better known internationally as RedNote—is scrambling to boost its ability to moderate English-language content after hundreds of thousands of American users suddenly joined the platform in anticipation of TikTok potentially being banned in the United States on Sunday. WIRED identified a handful of job listings posted to recruitment platforms by…
Jonathan Lachman, the previous head of special projects at OpenAI, recently left to join a new artificial intelligence research lab founded by former OpenAI executive Mira Murati, according to two people familiar with the discussions. It’s the most high-profile hire Murati has made since leaving OpenAI in September last year to start the much-hyped venture,…
Whether shifting teams to Texas will be anything more than symbolic is unclear. Common sense suggests if a person in California exhibits some sort of political preference, moving them to Texas isn’t likely to reshape their viewpoints immediately. In the same town hall call, company leadership described the Texas relocation as an attempt to address…