Technology News

The WIRED & Octopus Energy Tech Summit in Berlin was bursting with innovative ideas for reaching net zero and on working together at an ever-greater scale.

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US Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Congressman Jerry Nadler of New York have called on government bodies to investigate what they allege is the “predatory pricing” of .com web addresses, the Internet’s prime real estate.

In a letter delivered today to the Department of Justice and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, a branch of the Department of Commerce that advises the president, the two Democrats accuse VeriSign, the company that administers the .com top-level domain, of abusing its market dominance to overcharge customers.

In 2018, under the Donald Trump administration, the NTIA modified the terms on how much VeriSign could charge for .com domains. The company has since hiked prices by 30 percent, the letter claims, though its service remains identical and could allegedly be provided far more cheaply by others.

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This is the first time Russia has used its so-called Oreshnik intermediate-range ballistic missile in combat. The launch also serves as a warning to the West.

Can red light therapy really help your skin? Here are the benefits certain wavelengths can bring your skin, and which LED face masks (and other LED devices) are worth buying.

A great gamepad instantly levels up your play. These are our top picks for Switch, Xbox, PlayStation, and PC.

As long as your app works, the new premium Sonos soundbar is a marvel of acoustic engineering.

The weird, wonderful world of MagSafe accessories can make your smartphone feel modular. These are our favorites.

Want to surprise your feline friend or find the perfect gift for a cat lover? WIRED has you covered.

This superb mini arcade machine gets as close to playing cabinet games as they were originally intended.

What you shove into your suitcase determines how you’re going to live for the next little while. Assemble your payload correctly.

“If we go back to the early 1900s, this is when the idea was first proposed that memories are physically stored in some location within the brain,” says Michael R. Williamson, a researcher at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. For a long time, neuroscientists thought that the storage of memory in the brain was the job of engrams, ensembles of neurons that activate during a learning event. But it turned out this wasn’t the whole picture.

Williamson’s research investigated the role astrocytes, non-neuron brain cells, play in the read-and-write operations that go on in our heads. “Over the last 20 years the role of astrocytes has been understood better. We’ve learned that they can activate neurons. The addition we have made to that is showing that there are subsets of astrocytes that are active and involved in storing specific memories,” Williamson says in describing a new study his lab has published.

One consequence of this finding: Astrocytes could be artificially manipulated to suppress or enhance a specific memory, leaving all other memories intact.

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Donald Trump will have key levers he can use, but he faces limitations too.

No Time to Die, My Old Ass, and American Fiction are just a few of the movies you should be watching on Amazon Prime Video this week.

Plus: The worst telecom hack in US history rolls on, iPhones are harder to break into, and more of the week’s top security news.

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One of 2024's coolest hacking tales occurred two years ago, but it wasn't revealed to the public until Friday at the Cyberwarcon conference in Arlington, Virginia. Hackers with ties to Fancy Bear—the spy agency operated by Russia’s GRU—broke into the network of a high-value target after first compromising a Wi-Fi-enabled device in a nearby building and using it to exploit compromised accounts on the target’s Wi-Fi network.

The attack, from a group security firm Volexity calls GruesomeLarch, shows the boundless lengths well-resourced hackers will go to hack high-value targets, presumably only after earlier hack attempts haven’t worked. When the GruesomeLarch cabal couldn’t get into the target network using easier methods, they hacked a Wi-Fi-enabled device in a nearby building and used it to breach the target’s network next door. After the first neighbor’s network was disinfected, the hackers successfully performed the same attack on a device of a second neighbor.

Too close for comfort

“This is a fascinating attack where a foreign adversary essentially conducted a close access operation while being physically quite far away,” Steven Adair, a researcher and the president of Volexity, wrote in an email. “They were able to launch an attack that historically had required being in close proximity to the target but found a way to conduct it in a way which completely eliminated the risk of them being caught in the real world.”

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