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Enlarge / BARCELONA, SPAIN - 2021/10/02: Spanish tattoo artist Oscar Garcia works on a man, during the Expo. Fira de Barcelona hosts the XXIV edition of the Barcelona Tattoo Expo where tattoo artists from Spain and other countries exhibit tattoos and tattoo material such as ink, needles and special machinery for tattoo work. (Photo by Ramon Costa/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

The Food and Drug Administration has been warning for years that some tattoo inks are brimming with bacteria—a large assortment that, when injected into your skin, can cause inflammatory reactions, allergic hypersensitivity, toxic responses, and, of course, straight-up infections. And, worse yet, the labels that say the inks are sterile are not reliable.

But, a recent recall of three tattoo pigments from the same manufacturer does a good job of illustrating the FDA's concerns. The water-based inks, all from Sierra Stain, had a bizarre array of bacteria, which were found at high levels, according to FDA testing.

One ink product—described as "Carolina Blue"—offered a microbial menagerie, with six odd species identified. They included a bacterium that often dwells in the gastrointestinal system and can inflame the mucosal lining of the intestines (Citrobacter braakii), a water-borne bacterium (Cupriavidus pauculus), and several that cause opportunistic infections (Citrobacter farmer, Achromobacter xylosoxidans, Ochrobactrum anthropi, and Pseudomonas fluorescens). These are bacteria that don't typically go about attacking humans but will if the conditions are right, including when they find themselves inside a human with a compromised immune system.

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Enlarge / It's hard work, survival crafting, but there are moments for song, dance, and tankards. (credit: North Beach Games)

The dwarves of J.R.R. Tolkien's writing are, according to the author himself, "a tough, thrawn race for the most part, secretive, retentive of the memory of injuries (and of benefits)," and "lovers… of things that take shape under the hands of the craftsmen rather than things that live by their own life."

Is it secrecy and avarice that explains why The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria spent its first year of existence as an exclusive to the Epic Games Store? None can say for certain. But the survival crafting game has today arrived on Steam and Xbox, adding to its PlayStation and EGS platforms and bringing a 1.3 "Golden Update" to them all. Steam Deck compatibility is on its way to Verified, with a bunch of handheld niceties already in place.

The Golden Update grants new and existing players a procedurally generated sandbox mode to complement the game's (also generated) campaign, new weapons and armor, crossplay between all platforms with up to eight players, specific sliders for difficulty settings, and… a pause function in offline single-player, which seemingly was not there before.

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Schoolhouse Rock!, X-Men ’97, and Star Wars: Young Jedi Adventures are just a few of the shows you should be watching on Disney+ this month.

In a trial in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the drug tecovirimat, also known as TPOXX, was found to be no better than placebo at clearing mpox lesions.

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The federal government awarded another $521 million in EV charger funding today. It's the latest tranche of money to be awarded from a $7.5 billion program authorized by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which aims to build out fast chargers along interstate highways as well as bringing charging infrastructure to underserved communities.

$321 million from today's announcement will be spent on 41 different projects across the country—these projects are a mix of level 2 AC chargers as well as DC fast chargers. The remaining $200 million will continue funding DC fast chargers along designated highway corridors.

The Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, which administers the federal funding, called out a $15 million project to install chargers at 53 sites in Milwaukee and a $3.9 million project to install publicly accessible chargers on the Sioux Reservation in North Dakota as examples of the latest awards.

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• Tetris Forever includes several versions of the game that had been released over the years. [credit: Nintendo ]

A combination documentary and classic game compilation called Tetris Forever is headed to PC, Nintendo Switch, and other platforms later this year, according to an announcement.

The game will include 15 Tetris games, from an "accurate" version of the first Tetris for the Electronika 60 to an NES version of the game and more, including Tetris 2 + Bombliss, Super Tetris 3, and Tetris Battle Gaiden, among others.

In addition to that, it will feature a new take called Tetris Time Warp, which will see players jumping "between gameplay styles from across the series" in real time as they complete each board. The game will support up to four players.

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The shift toward renewables is officially in high gear.

Enlarge / A young Maurice Sendak’s illustration of two possible outcomes of atomic power for the 1947 pop-sci book Atomics for the Millions. (credit: McGraw Hill/Public domain)

Beloved American children's author and illustrator Maurice Sendak probably needs no introduction. His 1963 book, Where the Wild Things Are, is an all-time classic in the picture genre that has delighted generations of kids. It has sold over 19 million copies worldwide, won countless awards, and inspired a children's opera and a critically acclaimed 2009 feature film adaptation, as well as being spoofed on an episode of The Simpsons.

But one might be surprised to learn (as we were) that a teenage Sendak published his first professional illustrations in a 1947 popular science book about nuclear physics, co-authored by his high school physics teacher: Atomics for the Millions. Science historian Ryan Dahn came across a copy in the Niels Bohr Library & Archives at the American Institute of Physics in College Park, Maryland, and wrote a short online article about the book for Physics Today, complete with scans of Sendak's most striking illustrations.

Born in Brooklyn to Polish-Jewish parents, Sendak acknowledged that his childhood had been a sad one, overshadowed by losing many extended family members during the Holocaust. That, combined with health issues that confined him to his bed, compelled the young Sendak to find solace in books. When Sendak was 12, he watched Walt Disney's Fantasia, which inspired him to become an illustrator.

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Protect your home against dust, pets, allergies, and more with air purifiers tested firsthand by WIRED.

Enlarge / A building at Apple Park, the company's Cupertino, California, HQ. (credit: Apple)

Apple has announced a major change on its leadership team: Longtime Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri will step down from his role on January 1, 2025.

Maestri has, by all appearances, had a resoundingly successful run since he took on the CFO role a decade ago in 2014. In his tenure, Apple had its strongest fiscal decade ever, as the company's net income more than doubled.

Apple stock is worth nine times what it was when he stepped into the job. Certainly, that can't be attributed exclusively to the company's CFO, but it appears Maestri navigated both the popularity of the iPhone and the company's shift to services (which make five times more money than they did earlier in his time as CFO) well.

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Enlarge / AT&T's stand at Mobile World Congress on February 27, 2023, in Barcelona, Spain. (credit: Getty Images | Joan Cros Garcia-Corbis)

AT&T agreed to pay a $950,000 fine for an August 2023 outage in four states in which the carrier failed to deliver 911 calls and did not make timely notifications of the outage to eight 911 call centers. "As part of the settlement, AT&T will implement a three-year compliance plan designed to ensure future compliance with the FCC's 911 and outage notification rules," the Federal Communications Commission said in a press release yesterday.

The 2023 outage lasted 1 hour and 14 minutes, affecting users in Illinois, Kansas, Texas, and Wisconsin. It resulted in over 400 failed 911 calls.

"The 911 outage occurred during testing of portions of AT&T's 911 network," the FCC said. "During the testing, an AT&T contractor's technician inadvertently disabled a portion of the network, and AT&T's system did not automatically adjust to accommodate the disabled portion of the network, resulting in the outage. The testing was not associated with any planned maintenance activities and, thus, did not undergo the stringent technical review that would have otherwise been conducted."

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Sony’s updated hearing aids now have a rechargeable battery so you don’t have to fiddle with tiny cells.

Enlarge / Mark Zuckerberg. (credit: Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg)

After years of bickering with the Biden administration about vaccine misinformation, Mark Zuckerberg has now accused the White House of "repeatedly" pressuring Facebook for months "to censor certain COVID-19 content" in 2021 that Facebook supposedly would not have taken down without pressure.

In a letter to the US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee on Monday, the Meta CEO claimed that senior officials from the Biden administration "expressed a lot of frustration" when Facebook pushed back on certain content removal requests. According to Zuckerberg, the Biden administration didn't just want misinformation taken down, but also "humor and satire."

"Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take the content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19 related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure," Zuckerberg wrote, taking accountability for his platform's actions.

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High-quality components and tight integration with Analog Lab make a solid case for spending a bit more on your keys.

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Malicious hackers likely working on behalf of the Chinese government have been exploiting a high-severity zero-day vulnerability that allowed them to infect at least four US-based ISPs with malware that steals credentials used by downstream customers, researchers said Tuesday.

The vulnerability resides in the Versa Director, a virtualization platform that allows ISPs and managed service providers to manage complex networking infrastructures from a single dashboard, researchers from Black Lotus Labs, the research arm of security firm Lumen, said. The attacks, which began no later than June 12 and are likely ongoing, allow the threat actors to install "VersaMem,” the name Lumen gave to a custom web shell that gives remote administrative control of Versa Director systems.

Getting admin control of ISP infrastructure

The administrative control allows VersaMem to run with the necessary privileges to hook the Versa authentication methods, meaning the web shell can hijack the execution flow to make it introduce new functions. One of the functions VersaMem added includes capturing credentials at the moment an ISP customer enters them and before they are cryptographically hashed. Once in possession of the credentials, the threat actors work to compromise the customers. Black Lotus didn’t identify any of the affected ISPs, MSPs, or downstream customers.

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Since around 2013, Jonathan Mann’s sole job has been writing and posting a song online each day. With titles ranging from “Yeah, I’m Rocking a Headband” to “Joe Biden, Retire” (posted July 1), his pop tunes are at turns whimsical and topical. Some go viral.

Still, says the Connecticut-based Mann (aka “Song a Day Mann”), monetization was a “slog.” Sales from distribution platform Bandcamp and advertising revenue from YouTube “never amounted to much.” Conference performances and jingle contests filled the gaps. Then came NFTs, which let Mann attach one-of-a-kind blockchain-based tokens to his songs so buyers could easily purchase unique copies online. The tech transformed his music-selling game.

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At Google's Think Retail event, we'll share new tools to help retailers make quick decisions during the holiday, from jumping on trends quickly to simplifying their perf…At Google's Think Retail event, we'll share new tools to help retailers make quick decisions during the holiday, from jumping on trends quickly to simplifying their performance reports.

Clever products don’t have to cost the earth. For your convenience, WIRED has put our top value picks into one useful spot.

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Content warning: The following story describes instances of animal abuse.

In 2017, the Des Moines, Iowa, lawyer Philip Colt Moss was facing felony drug charges after a raid on his townhome turned up marijuana, hash, OxyContin, Klonopin, Xanax, zolpidem (the active ingredient in Ambien), and "four pills that contained methylphenidate" (the active ingredient in Ritalin).

The cops found enough material that they charged Moss as a drug dealer, but Moss' lawyer told the Des Moines Register that his client was simply someone who "needs help." Moss had stepped aside from his work as an attorney and "checked into an eight-week inpatient treatment facility outside of Iowa," the paper reported at the time.

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The Sound of Freedom hero and Trump ally won renown claiming to save women and children. Women who worked closely with him, though, say he preyed on them—and have watched with disbelief as his star has continued to shine.