WIRED

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.

TOTALLY WIRED • NOTES FROM OUR STAFF

WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS NOW • The power, and paradox, of bad software.

I’VE HEARD THIS BEFORE • A YouTube radio archivist blasts me to the past.

QANON’S GENIUS • The conspiracy theory has the best attributes of a multiplatform game—except it’s dangerous and in real life.

GHOST ME, FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE

BEAUTIFUL AND BUTTERFREE • Players of the alternate-reality game Pokémon Go are still at it. They also seem, in these crazy days, to exhibit well-being.

CHARTGEIST

Use PROTECTION • The world is full of creeps, snoops, and interlopers. We’re here with tips and tech to help you shield your home, devices, and digital life from prying eyes.

Private EYES • With automated motion-tracking features and sensors that can see in the dark, these are our favorite cameras for monitoring the inside of your home from afar.

Camera OBSCURA • Cops, corporations, and citizens alike are surveilling our public spaces with tools like facial recognition and infrared cameras. Whether you’re protesting or just stepping out for a boba, you deserve some algorithm-free alone time.

Block PARTY • It’s not hard for bad actors to track or hack your phone. But put it inside a Faraday pouch and you can drop off the digital map.

Inspector GADGET • Boost both your network security and your web browsing speed with this DIY content filter.

MAKE THINGS BETTER • When Sartre said hell is other people, he wasn’t living through 2020. Right now, other people are the only thing between us and species collapse. Not just the people we occasionally encounter behind fugly masks—but the experts and innovators out in the world, leading the way. The 17-year-old hacker building his own coronavirus tracker. The Google AI wonk un-coding machine bias. A former IT guy helping his community thwart surveillance. There are people everywhere, in and out of the spotlight—in tech, science, food, culture, politics—who aren’t deterred by disaster. Their wish: To make things better for all of us. Sounds like heaven. —THE EDITORS

A MORE PERFECT ELECTION • Fraud-proof. Suppression-proof. Hacker-proof. Doubt-proof. Across the country, people are working hard to reboot the American voting system.

LONE STAR • How one TEXAS county clerk set off the biggest, weirdest, and most promising REVOLUTION in American voting technology since the 1800s.

HOW TO FEND OFF RUSSIAN INTERFERENCE • An international playbook

THE MASTER’S TOOLS • Donald Trump’s BRILLIANT use of Facebook was key to his victory in 2016. Now a group of former staffers from the company is trying to turn his playbook AGAINST HIM.

An interview with STACEY ABRAMS • The former Democratic candidate for GEORGIA GOVERNOR and founder of the advocacy organization FAIR FIGHT talks democracy, voter suppression, and why speaking Klingon doesn’t always help. As told to GILAD EDELMAN.

THE CHECKS IN THE MAIL • Why it would be nearly impossible to commit MASS VOTER FRAUD—and easy to detect if somebody tried.

“BELIEFS CAN BE HACKED” • Data scientist SARA-JAYNE TERP is on a quest to quash MISINFORMATION online. Her approach: Treat it like malware and deploy the tools of CYBERSECURITY to trace the virus back to its source.

Nothing to see here. • From...